Inspired by the post on Alledia blog about Speed and Joomla, I thought I would write some things about how to improve the speed of your Joomla website, using some Joomla integrated stuff and some free tools.
Speed is important, both for Search Engine spiders as for the visitors of your website!
First thing you should do, is test your website with the The Ocatagate tool to get a basic feeling of the loading time before you start… you want some reference point don’t you.
The slow loading things you might see are,:
- the absence of a favicon.ico in the root of you file.
That is easily solved by creating one from an image at Online Chami Favicon creator and uploading it to the root of your website.
- Big images – reduce the images to the size the really need, don’t let a browser resize them “on the fly” and make sure you use the “height” and “width” specifications with each image if possible.
- That nice looking Joomla Module that gets all kinds of content form the database…
- Java scripting and external links..
Try to use those only where you really, really need them.
A great free tool to resize images to the right format is Irfanview , it works great in keeping the images scharp even if you resize down from a very large image.
Speeding up with Joomla Core
Joomla itself has a really nice feature already installed for you, its called Cache, and you can turn it on in the configuration file.
Set the cache time to something appropriate to your site, for a news site, keep the standard of 900 seconds which is 150 minutes.
Most of my site will have 43200 seconds, that’s 12 hours.
After you have done that, turn on the caching functions of each module if needed, don’t forget to check each module!
If you still have your statistics turned on, turn them off !, accept for the search.
When was the last time you checked them?
But if you really like statistics.. don’t your really want more information than those basics on your visitors?
For my sites statistics I use Statcounter and I get all the information I need, including the history in a nice stats graphic even for a whole year to see the growth.
If you want to know where the visitors came from and lots more.
Best part is this detail information and the rest is Free for the first 100 pageviews per site , and its fast !!
If you think a link out to Statcounter might hurt your ranking… , think again, they are one of the very few websites that have a Google PR of 10!
After you optimized, and cleaned up your site, check the loading time again.
I hope you get a pleasant surprise, and so do search engine, as they are able to index your pages faster then before…
11 responses so far ↓
More Speed for Your Joomla site « Seo for Joomla - Making Joomla Search Engine Optimized // April 25, 2007 at 12:39 pm
[...] April 25th, 2007 in Joomla SEO, Search Engine Optimization by Hummerbie I talked to you about How to speed up your Joomla Site and now I have to tell your the next step to [...]
Jon // October 10, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Excellent articles with great tips! Joomla’s got a great community…thanks for your insight.
Milos // November 10, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Thanks! Well I have “googled” your site and I have to say this is a good article. I have a lot of custom code on view sites of mine so I´m looking for tricks and so to optimize the loading time, I have mentioned that SEO URLs on a news site are LoadingTime Killers so I turned them of.
Greetings from Regensburg, Germany
JM // December 18, 2007 at 4:11 pm
yes but what about after you do this and it is still slow.
Hummerbie // December 18, 2007 at 8:53 pm
@JM
You could try a Cache Component from http://www.joomlaperformance.com/
But you should also look closely to all the javascripts and stuff you pull from other sites for your homepage.
There are some strange website links in you code
I would start hunting down the site slowdown by disabeling one module at the time, empty my browser cache and see how this effects te loading time.
Starting with the magnily video widget or set some longer scrolling time and fewer items to load.
Take off the Monthly archives module and replace it with something like categories.
You should also decide on what is your main url, with or without http://www. and put that in you .htaccess file!
More info on http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/joomla-seo/get-free-pagerank-for-your-joomla-website.html
You should also check your javascripts for ads delivery and ajax comments.
I hope this will help you find the loadtime problem!
Steve // December 28, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Those are some great tips thanks.
Toolbe Webmaster Seo Search Engine // January 24, 2008 at 10:08 pm
very useful, thank you postin these tips.
speed and loading time are still the biggest weaknesses of joomla.
security suditing, penertration testing // February 6, 2008 at 5:21 pm
hi there.
has any one had some problems with logging in?
John // March 6, 2008 at 1:44 am
very useful, thank you all for the tips. speed and loading time are still the biggest weaknesses of joomla
bill // March 6, 2008 at 10:25 am
Are stats still listed for Joomla 1.5? I can’t find them to turn them off. Quite possible I’m looking right at them?
Hummerbie // March 6, 2008 at 6:59 pm
@Bill: No, Stats are no longer in the Joomla core.
You can find a great comparison on Joomla 1.0.x and Joomla 1.5 backend at:
http://www.joomlashine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1&Itemid=5
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