How to Speed up Joomla Website

Are you facing issues with the speed of your Joomla website? Is it taking too long to load? If so, it’s time to take some corrective actions to improve your speed before it adversely affects your business. Here are some tips that can help boost your Joomla speed.

Why is website speed important?

Speed is considered to be one of the most important aspects for the success of a website. Users prefer faster websites and will leave your website if it loads slowly. This can result in low conversion rates and poor search engine rankings – with speed now one of the parameters used by Google and other search engines for their rankings.

1. Pick a good web host
   A good web hosting service plays a crucial role in helping you have a faster site. Take time to study different hosting providers and choose one that best suits your needs. Avoid hosts that have a reputation for being slow and which don’t provide industry-standard hosting services.
2. Enable Joomla Cache
   If you don’t change the content of your website frequently you can speed up your site by caching. When a web page is first loaded, caching ensures that the whole web page is copied, so that the next time the user visits, the webpage won’t need to be fully reloaded only the previously stored copy will be displayed. This improves speed because the server does not have to send all the information needed to create the page.
   1. To set up Caching
   2. Go to Global configuration
   3. Go to System Tab
   4. Choose Cache Settings
   5. Select progressive caching and conservative caching
      Conservative Caching: It caches the data for every unique visitor.
      Progressive Caching: It caches and directs similar data to all visitors
   6. To enable Joomla Cache plugin
   7. Go to extensions
   8. Go to Plugin Manager
   9. Check for System cache plugin and then enable it.
3. Facilitate G-Zip Compression
   With G-Zip compression, the size of the webpage is reduced or compressed before being sent to the users. The user’s browser will then perform the function of uncompressing the website. This does not take a lot of time and it is much faster compared to transferring uncompressed web pages.
   1. To set up G-Zip Compression
   2. Go to Global Configuration
   3. Go to Server option and select Server Settings
   4. Select Gzip Page Configuration and enable it
4. Remove undesirable extensionsTo handle different functions of your website, extensions or plugins are often required. However, not all extensions that you use are well optimized. Non-optimized plugins can cause your website to slow down. When choosing a plugin don’t just look at the benefits it offers, you should also consider its impact on usability, search engines optimization and speed. Avoid loading your website with lots of extensions as more HTTPS requests are required. Always uninstall any unused extensions for better performance. You may wish to install plugins that are designed to improve speed.
5. Configure your .htaccess file
   .htaccess file is a configuration file that controls the directory and subdirectories of your website. Making changes to this file can improve the site speed. Some widely adopted additions that can speed up the site are:
   1. ETag this directs browsers to get images from the local browser cache rather than from the server.
   2. Expires headers different expiration times can be allotted to different file types
   3. AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE this allows the HTML source code to be minimized by eliminating empty lines, breaks and spaces.
6. Use optimized images
   Images can take up a lot of space on a website and large images or a page with too many images can cause your website to load slowly. It is very important to use optimized images that are the right size. Make sure your images are the right dimension for your theme, are .jpeg or .png and are no more than 72dpi.\
7. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
   A Content Delivery Network is an interconnected system of proxy servers distributed globally, deployed in various data centres. CDN can speed up the loading of a website as it shortens the distance between the server sending the content and the user visiting the site. If users are located far away from the server, they will receive the content from the nearest location.
8. Optimize JavaScript and Css+
   When content is rendered by a browser from a website, it must process the layout information and style for a web page. Until the external scripts are downloaded, rendering will be blocked by the browser. If your site has lots of plugins and add-ons, multiple round-trips are required to bring each script before rendering occurs, thus slowing down your site. An apt solution for this problem is compressing CSS and JavaScript files. This task can be performed manually but it is time consuming. Optimizations of CSS and JavaScript files can be done with the help of T3 framework. It is very easy. Go to general settings of the framework, select the option optimize JavaScript and CSS and enable it. Eliminate the files that are to be optimized and click on save.
9. Are you mobile-responsive
   All websites should now be designed to work equally as well on mobile devices as on computers and laptops, especially as Google now ranks responsive websites higher than those that don’t cater for the needs of mobile users. You can find information about how your site performs on mobile devices at Google PageSpeed Insights. It will also help you fix any issues that may arise.

Conclusion

From reading this article you should now have a much clearer understanding of how you can improve the speed of your Joomla website and why it is important to do so.

A good web hosting services plays a crucial role in helping you have a faster site. Take time to study different hosting providers and choose one that best suits your needs. Avoid hosts that have a reputation for being slow and which don’t provide industry standard hosting services.