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Feb
27
2007
Three Ways to Make Sure Your Joomla Site Runs Fast
Written by Steve Burge   
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Over the last few years, we've seen revelations about the huge amounts of data that Google collects about us, our websites, our browsing habits and our lives in general. Wikipedia has a list of everything Google knows about you, and thats only what has been confirmed.


Although theres a server full of information about you in Google headquarters, there's only piece of data about your website that they consider important enough to put in their search results - the size of your website:


speed4.png

 

For Alledia.com its 48k. Why might this be the single most important statistic about your website? Quite simply, the faster your site loads, the more useful it will for your users. As we mentioned before, Google keeps a track of how fast your site loads and may well boost your ranking if it is sufficiently fast.

 

Some Major Websites and Their Size

 


What does that big size difference mean in reality?

For people using a 56k modem, the ESPN site will take a minute and a half to load and Google will take about 3 seconds. Under 50k is good for a site and under 30k is great.


All of these following tools work in more or less the same way - the longer the bar, the longer that part of the site takes to load. Looking at the image below, you can see that XAjax mambot is the slowest object on the page.

 

This is often the case with Joomla. Mambots are a major cause of slow sites, particularly because they need to load on every page, not just on the pages where they are being used. Large photos and widgets from external sites are other common culprits.


If you do want your Joomla site to run as fast possible, use the following tools. You may need to spend time making changes, but your visitors will thank you for a faster site:

 

1) Use the Octagate Site Timer

Picture 1.png

2) Use the WebsitesiteOptimization.com check

speed1.png

3) Use the Firebug Extension for Firefox

Click on "Net" and after browsing to the web page you want to analyze, click on "HTML", "CSS", "JS", "Images" or whichever aspect of the site you want to analyze.

speed3.png


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Your Comments (10)

0
Ben Strackany
January 02, 2008

You can also install Fiddler and the Timeline extension (go http://www.fiddler2.com/Fiddler2/extensions.asp and scroll down a bit) to get a site speed chart.

Gomez.com offers great tools from different datacenters around the world, but they're not free (other than their 5-tries free trial page).

0
emagin
March 18, 2008

These site meters are very confusing and wildly different from one another.
Using Octagate on a site I monitor, I get total times of 5.5 to 6 seconds
Using Site24x7 to monitor same site, I get total times of .9 to 1.5 seconds.

Octagate seems to show higher times for all the sites I test compared to Site24x7.

There are probably other services that are better, just trying to point out some very big differences here.

0
software_developer
May 21, 2008

First of all it is important to select CMS with good performance

Try following link for Typo3, Joomla!, and Drupal CMSs performance testing:
http://blogs.helion-prime.com/alexshapovalov/2008/05/19/typo3-joomla-and-drupal-cmss-performance-testing.html

0
sunnybear
July 22, 2008

This month we have released English version of Web Optimizator. It's even better than all the mentioned tools
http://webo.name/

Ansiklopedi
Ulas ALKAN
July 23, 2008

hi

i was also using 2th one but 1th and 3th options are aso great.

thanks for them

0
zuborg
September 11, 2008

Have you ever tryed http://Site-Perf.com/ ? This online tool not even measure site loading speed, but also can verify quality of internet link of your server.

0
Soumendra Jena
January 10, 2009

Hello..
I just discovered a new way to make your Joomla site load faster.
You can rad the whole artile here,
http://www.joomlahackers.net/j...mizer.html

0
HarryKrijnen
February 09, 2009

I just found out that google makes a mistake about the size of a website when frames are used. A school with the same name has the numer one spot on the serach term "obs meander" and it's size is 2k according to google. Howerver the site has a few images of 22k+ each...

steve
Steve Burge
February 09, 2009

Very interesting find - thanks Harry. Would be nice if Google would just layout how they calculated that number ...

0
Donna
September 14, 2009

I really need guidance for speeding up my Joomla site, its quite popular now and it seems too slow when loading some images.
Thanks for your info, hope I can find better tools for optimizing my J 1.0.

Regards,
Donna

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