Well currently 12 16 ways but with your help we will make it 101! I’ll update the post as and when we get more ways to speed up your joomla site.
What with Matt Cutts recent (ish) interview with Web Pro News, he mentions that google will be taking page load times into consideration when they rank your website. What does this mean for all the joomla users? Can joomla keep up?
I’ve actually just upgraded our server on our promo gifts home page to a dedicated server, partly for the SEO and partly because the shared hosting is not enough for us anymore. There is quite a large shellout for a dedicated server… you can pay anything from £70 right upto £380 a month, and probably more also. Ours cost us about £1750 for the year. This includes a quad core processor and some other things that I didn’t really understand… But not everyone can afford to do this so I would like to discuss other ways in which to speed up your joomla website.
We will start our list with the basics and build from there.
1. Remove “white space” from your template index.php
2. Optimize all your images – Most if not all should be at least below 10kb
2.a Crop the white space using Photoshop
2.b Use PNG8 Files or GIF files rather than Jpegs and don’t use transparancy
2.c Make images the size you want rather than resizing them in the editor
3. Optimize your Css, remove un-needed code
Then use something like this to optimise it
4. Goto MySQL Admin and select all the tables and repair and then optimize them
5. Uninstall any components/modules/plugins that you don’t actually use
6. Enable Gzip Compression from within the Global Config
7. Enable Cacheing from within the Global Config
8. Use an offsite Stats Tracker like Google Analytics rather than an onsite one
The onsite ones take up a lot of resources.
9. Install a fast simple template such as “Bolt” or “Afterburner“
10. Get a dedicated server.
Expensive but will give you a lot more speed over shared hosting.
11. If you can’t afford a dedicated server…
at least get your site off of GoDaddy/1to1/other awful server! Get it on a webhost that specializes in Joomla, like Rochen.
12. Host your site in the country where your customers are.
Common sense really! The less data centres your site travels through the quicker it will be.
13. Don’t host files on your web server that you do not use, large or small.
14. Minimize Javascript use.
If you have to use Javascript, put it in its own file and call it only when it’s absolutely necessary.
15. Don’t use external images, iframes or similar.
16. In refernece to 15… Don’t use things like Twitter Feeds…
or anything that relies on exteral servers to send info before the page can load
17. Utilise a sub domain to host most if not all of your images. I recently exported all my images to a sub-domain and have noticed significant improvements.
I would class the 2. as 4 seperate ones but I think it all falls under image optimization.
Please use the comments form to add more ways to speed up your joomla site and I will add them into the list.