Speed up Joomla is the first requirement for any high traffic joomla website. And even though your joomla website have no too much traffic, you still need to speed up Joomla.

Why we have to speed up Joomla website?

Before we do step by step to speed up joomla, let ‘s figure out the main reasons why we have to do these boring stuffs. Here are the list of reasons:

Step by Step to speed up Joomla

1. Choose the right hosting from the best joomla hosting company

It ‘s very important to choose the right joomla hosting to speed up joomla performance, unless all of your works will not help. A good joomla hosting need to meet many requirements such as server hardware, joomla system requirements, joomla expert support, server caching, dynamic cache, CDN ready support …. If you are not sure which one is the best, we recommend you try SiteGround Joomla Hosting package ($3.95/month) what match all of joomla requirements to get joomla work fastest.

2. Enable Joomla Compression

This is very simple step but important and save a lot of your server resource in high traffic website.

It is natively supported by Joomla! – no extensions needed and requires mod_gzip/deflate to be enabled on the server. If you have a good joomla hosting then you can make sure it is ready on your server and feel free to enalbe it as this screenshot:

3. Enable Joomla Cache

Enable the “System – Cache” plugin

And make sure you follow the Recommended Cache Settings as screenshot below:

4. Optimizations: Images, CSS & JS

Have you ever tried to wait to see the image loading 30s? If you already got the angry feeling from that, then you shouldn’t let your customers wait to long from static files by these steps:

1. Resize images – never upload 2560×1600 pictures
2. Smush your images
3. Minify and combine CSS and JS files
4. Use image sprites

Sounds Nice, How Do I Begin?

1. Use smush.it
2. Photoshop/Fireworks
3. Joomla! Extensions

Here are some optimization image/css/js extension with high rating on internet for joomla

1. JCH Optimize – Combines JS and CSS, Combines images in sprites, Minify and Compress (THE MOST RATING)
2. Jbetolo – same as above but + CDN support
3. JotCache – improves the Joomla! built in Core Cache
4. Cache Cleaner – easily clean the cache from the Joomla! admin panel

5. Optimize browser cache to speed up joomla by .htaccess

If there is any secret for joomla performance from browser cache then this should be a best secret you should use for your joomla site:

Please ask your developer if these code make your site work not properly, he will know how to correct it.

6. Use CDN service for your website for the best performance

Server location is one of the best way to optimize to get the best speed. It ‘ lucky because we have very good feature of server what can help us have best speed globally, it ‘s CDN service. This service will serve static files base on location of users.

Even more than that it will cache data on their server and every time the files load again, it will update from their server, and we will save our bandwidth and server load resource. Of course, we always have way to clear cache from CDN server for our domain website.

One of the best CDN service solution is MaxCDN, their service is very stable and fast. Other than that, they have solution for anti DDOS, security …

7. Check Joomla Speed

The final step is checking how fast of your site. This ‘s quite nice step what all of people really want to see. Now use one of these services to check:

• Google Page Speed Insights – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
• YSlow – http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
• GTmetrix – http://gtmetrix.com/

Thanks Joomla Expert Forum team what help us a lot in research for this article. We hope it will save your time to speed up your joomla site and get more customers. If you have any idea, please leave us in comment area.