4 Best Practices To Speed Up Your Joomla Website

The rank has dropped down...and how do I get back there? Is this the mind set you are in? If so, the very first thing you need to understand is that a slow site can impede your ability to rank well in search engines besides intruding user-experience. In other words, only faster websites are ranked higher because they provide visitors with a better experience. Make them wait for 30 seconds or more and see losing them.

Here is the step-by-step guide to discover the current speed of your Joomla 3.x site and learn how to speed up your CMS today.

1. Measuring the size and speed of the Joomla 3.x website 

When was the last time you checked the speed of your website?  No clue! Well, using a tool such as Pingdom or the Page Speed add-on for Firebug, or the YSlow Chrome plugin will give you a score in comparison with other tested sites, and then a breakdown of performance highlighting areas where you can improve your CMS site.

2. Optimization Settings (Images, CSS, Java Scripts)

To speed up your website:

• Upload big scale pictures post resizing

• Use a lighter and simpler website template to play it simple

• Compress the size of CSS files and Javascript files

• Clean up occasionally and remove the unwanted components, modules, plugins, “Not Found” queries as part of Joomla website maintenance.

3. Gzip Compression Feature Setting

As the name implies, The Gzip Compression feature lets you compress your website pages before sending them to the user. It only takes less time than transferring uncompressed pages. In Joomla 3.x, this feature is disabled and therefore need to enable it manually.

4. Choose the Right Hosting Partner

Is your website server put among as hundreds or thousands of other sites? If so, this might be the reason why the loading speed is slow and not to blame many clients try to access this server at the same time.

Therefore, ensure that you choose the right hosting from a reputable provider who offers a limited number of sites per server, server hardware and cache support, and Joomla expert support.

Optimising your Joomla website is a continuous process of finding the right balance between the quantity and quality of the content, and its size and speed of loading.