Home / SEO / 101 Ways to speed up your Joomla site 
SEO
Feb
02
2010
101 Ways to speed up your Joomla site
Written by David Dawson   
Avatar

101joomlaspeedWell 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

 

 

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.

 

Read more articles by this author:

Comments  

 
#1 Jen Kramer 2010-02-02 14:23
13. 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.

14. Minimize Javascript use.

15. If you have to use Javascript, put it in its own file and call it only when it's absolutely necessary.


The #1 way to speed up your Joomla site, though, is to get it on a decent server.

Jen
Quote
 
 
#2 Steve Burge 2010-02-02 14:32
Absolutely agree Jen

We're probably are getting a little extorted by our current hosting company but they work and work fast.

Plus, when I remember back to the days on several bad hosting companies ...
Quote
 
 
#3 m. 2010-02-02 19:19
But, what happens when all the extra js comes "bundled" with modules and components?

I'm sure joomla would be a lot faster if developers would settle for a js framework and stick to the same one everytime.

My 2 cents: #use image sprites.
Quote
 
 
#4 Rita Lewis 2010-02-02 21:02
I agree with all of your suggestions and have the experience this week to confirm that there is a definite speed bounce from going from a shared server to a dedicated one. I recently moved three clients to Rochen and the results were startling. My only beef with dedicated servers is the expense of the storage and bandwidth. Joomla's databases can grow huge for older sites (one site I moved has over 1,000 articles, videos, mp3s, and such). The storage fills up fast.

My other question has to do with your suggestion to install a slim template like Bolt. It is very difficult to convince some clients that these very plain jane templates can compete in marketing with the jazzy EScene, Rocket, Gavick, and Bamboo templates. I agree with you that the slimmer templates are faster, easier to configure and customize, and maintain; but how do you not use the fancy template when your client insists? Any suggestions?
Quote
 
 
#5 Rita Lewis 2010-02-02 21:05
Steve, GreenGeeks should be on the "bad" list because they say they are optimized for Joomla but their servers are configured with Registered Globals On and their support is very poor. It is difficult to find a definitive list of shared server hosts who actually optimize their computers for Apache/PHP/MySQL. I find they begin to throttle back sites and over-book servers, thus causing major time outs. And there is no way to avoid the speed hit when this happens except to move (which I've had to do three times now).
Quote
 
 
#6 Ivo Apostolov 2010-02-03 01:06
Don't use external images, iframes or similar.
Quote
 
 
#7 Anton 2010-02-03 02:01
Is there a mod for Joomla that would somehow allow measuring performance? It would be good to be able to compare it "before" and "after", to see which of the changes make the biggest impact...
Quote
 
 
#8 David Dawson 2010-02-03 04:46
Have added your comments on Jen :-)

On another note... should I add. Don't use Twitter feeds? I've noticed that a page waiting for twitter updates seem to allways be slow as they are reliant on twitter to send info for them to load

actually I will add that on... please feel free to oppose any of the suggestions!
Quote
 
 
#9 Rita Lewis 2010-02-03 07:29
David, I have a general question about SEO and Joomla, namely all of these suggestions entail taking the functionality of a dynamic site and sort of emasculating it to enhance speed. I can see the deletion of unused extensions as well as the turning off of extraneous options such as print, PDF, and email for all articles as well as using feeds judiciously, but there seems to be a contradiction in "gaming" headings and title tags vs. creation of meaningful content that bothers me.

As a writer, I want my article titles to inform my readers of what the article is about without having to tortuously bend it to fit some algorithm a search engine uses. Yes, the title tag is invisible, but it still should reflect what the article really deals with rather than throwing keywords in (even in a meaningful way). The same with the introductory paragraph -- it should introduce "who, what, where, when, and why" of that specific article and not of the website. Hiding keywords seems to be cheating and especially since most content on a website is written by users and editors and is very difficult to change without going through a bureaucracy.

As a content-oriented web designer and someone deeply committed to usability, this part of SEO really bothers me. And this is compounded by suggestions of hacking Joomla mods to remove extraneous code. I'm not a programmer and every time I try to follow instructions from "Joomla experts" (I've been creating Joomla sites since Mambo days) on changing code, it blows up the website.

Why not enhance speed and enable faster searches by letting Google's algorithm function and not worry about the internal code of extensions. One's client's pick the features and functions they want and sometimes the existing extensions are not particularlly optimized or conducive to speed tweaks without knowing PHP programming.

I just can't see the purpose in bending Joomla and other dynamic web platforms into pretzels to perform. If we're going to destroy the fun parts of Joomla as well as the beauty of a design for speed, I think Google and other Search engines are doing a disservice to users.
Quote
 
 
#10 David Dawson 2010-02-03 08:03
@mayanscaper Regards to the bolt template... I've been using it on my site for ages now.
I moved from bolt over to a Solar Sentinal, rocket theme template because it gave me a load more module positions and space to promote products. And it did look awesome. I loved it.

But check out my load times. We also lost about 65% of our traffic in that period.


At the end of the day my site is there to bring orders in. And for this I need relevant traffic.

I think in answer to your question about advising clients... its best to consider what the end result they are looking for is, and whats more important? Flashy graphics and JS features or converted leads? Its weighing up brand image importance over sales conversions.
Quote
 

Add comment


Security code
Refresh