Tracing back to the twenties century, Aldous Huxley, prominent English writer said, ‘Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure’. Undoubtedly, this quotation is like a peeping into the crystal ball of the future. In today’s world of web technologies, the speed is a crucial component of running your business on the web, getting in touch with your friends or colleagues, having fun, and many others. So, moving on to the target of this article, we are going to talk on how to optimize your Joomla CMS website speed.
You know, it’s not a back-door notion that Joomla couldn’t make boast of its on-the-fly performance. That is why you should be aware of must-have best practices on how to organize all the operations strategically to make your Joomla load fast and nice. So, let’s look through the stages.
#1 Uptime Monitor
Initially, you should take the issue of loading time under control. So, it’s essential to get notifications on the exact speed of site browsing time, downtime and uptime. Currently, there are available a great variety of extensions and third party tools. We have composed a set of the most popular:
- Pingdom – this instrument tests your website as frequently as one minute automatically and when anything has happened, Pingdom sends you a notification via Twitter, SMS, email, or app-in to warm you when things break, on critical website changes, error messages, etc.
SiteUptime – monitors your website every 5, 30, 60 minute depending on the package plan you will choose. While speaking about the alert system offer, SiteUptime has a little bit limited notification program – accordingly to the particular plan you’ll get from 10 to 20 SMS and call credits, but for free plan options are limited reasonably.- Monitor Scout – choosing this monitor tracker, you’ll be able to opt for passive or active site monitoring. It allows to receive email or SMS notification for multiple users, providing them with the detailed information about response time, uptime and more. The only disadvantage of this monitor system is rather complicated interface that requires some time to get used to it.
- Webmon – matching both for simple CMS platforms and shopping carts, this utility is best fitted for multiple websites that should be monitored within one dashboard. Webmon enhances the great alert system.
- StatusCake – is well-suited for small business websites, it possesses an intuitive interface and is easy to manage the monitor of your site. While detecting a website downtime, StatusCake diligentlly checks out the site status within a few servers and then alerts you about the problem.
#2 Template Optimization
It’s one story when your website is in good looks, but it’s absolutely different one, if in addition it is well-indexed by search engines. With the last you may face with a few difficulties that we have composed the comprehensive solutions ready at hand:
Single Image File
In order to increase your website loading time, it’s highly recommended to merge all the multiple icons and images into single image file. In this way, you’ll reduce a number of http requests to the server.- Google Analytic + Joomla Template
One more trick of rapid and efficient tracking and indexing is the unity of Google Analytic and Joomla template. To insert your GA code into Joomla site, you should edit the HTML code of your site in the following way: find out the tag </body> and paste Google Analytic tracking code just before this code. - Enable H1
Technically, Joomla doesn’t allow to use H1 tag at your headings, but in terms of search engine optimization, it’s one of the most important practices. So, you should override your website code to enable H1 tag.
#3 Consider Ambitiously – Use CDN
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, that is a set of servers that are used to offer resources to end users all over the world. In plain words, if your website contributes to people around the world, CDN is the #1 solution for your site to work well for everyone. CDN increases the speed of your side content loading all over the world. To implement Content Delivery Network to your website, first you should proceed with is to choose CDN service, there are a great variety of them. Then, configure CDN file to your Joomla site with the help of extension. And that’s it.
#4 Upgrade Joomla Version And Extensions
Well being brief, the latest version of Joomla means security protected site, majority of updates, more flexibility and ease of use. Also, make sure that your current extensions are relevant now. otherwise, update them or delete unnecessary ones. In case, your Joomla is not upgraded now, you may set up an automated Joomla upgrade with aisite.
#5 Old Good Trick – Image Optimization
By default Joomla doesn’t allow to index your images which is not good at all. So, you should go to your Joomla robots.txt file and remove Disallow: /images/ line. Also, don’t forget about the name of images – use keywords and separate words using hyphens.
At the moment. that’s all, not to make you bored. Follow our blog posts to get more information on your successful website management. Have any tips of Joomla site optimization? Please, share them at the comment section below!
