• Speed Up Joomla – Full Tutorials

    by  • September 9, 2013 • Blog • 12 Comments

    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.

    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:

    • Customer is not patient, they willing leave our website right away if the website loading take them more than 2 seconds. Save our customers time then we save them on our website and it is one of the main reasons why they keep working with us, keep using our services, become our partners, buy our products …
    • How much time you pay every day to take care your joomla website? If every day your works with website take you 60 page load to overview and update content, then it ‘s quite nice to speed up every load 2 seconds, it will save you 2 minutes daily. It ‘s a huge number for a year working. You saved your time and your money
    • Search engine only love fast website: Google will not love your website any more if your website is too slow and take them too much time to crawl your website. Google have too many websites what need to crawl to their server and index them so that they only pay a limited time for that job. They willing let your website out of their list because it ‘s too long. And of course, the slow website can’t have a good rank on search result.
    • The trust: how you can make your customers trust your services with a slow website? How they can trust you if they don’t trust your website quality? So we only have one way to make our business keep moving is “Speed up Joomla”

    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.

    Tips
    Almost people are happy with the new speed after moving to the new hosting company. So that we should invest more time to hosting company option for joomla. More information you can look at the blog post the best joomla hosting

    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:

    joomla speed up-compress

    3. Enable Joomla Cache

    Enable the “System – Cache” plugin

    enable cache

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

    cache settings

    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.

    maxcdn

    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:

    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.

    87 Review(s)

    4.6 / 5

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    12 Responses to Speed Up Joomla – Full Tutorials

    1. Simon
      January 23, 2014 at 6:27 am

      It ‘s really nice to know a very easy way to improve my website, it seem my problem come from hosting. My website work perfect after moving to siteground hosting. I am wondering if you have any other instruction how to use supercacher what I think it will make my website even faster. Thanks

      Reply
      • Jenifer
        January 23, 2014 at 6:35 am

        Hi Simon, I think I am in the same problem with you. But I think you just need to turn on cloudflare and configure memcached then the joomla site will work much faster. It ‘s fast more than enough with me 🙂

        Reply
        • wp2x.com
          February 7, 2014 at 12:20 am

          Actually, if you can try to configure CDN you can take it much more faster. It just take you one click to activate it

          Reply
    2. David Pham
      April 24, 2014 at 3:02 pm

      For the Free service of CDN, I think the best one is CloudFlare https://www.cloudflare.com

      Reply
      • Phan Phieu
        August 10, 2014 at 9:15 am

        Hello David Pham,

        Your name as Vietnamese name?, you are Vietnamese?
        – I am using VPS for my joomla site (my domain pointing to VPS’s IP), how to configure mysite for use Cloudflare?

        Best regards!
        p/s: If you are Vietnamese please reply me by Vietnamese, OK?
        Cám ơn!

        Reply
      • David Pham
        August 10, 2014 at 9:19 am

        Hello Hiếu, give me your email, I will help you via email. Thanks

        Reply
    3. Phan Phieu
      August 6, 2014 at 10:08 am

      Hello,

      I am using NGINX, how to config anything similar .htaccess on NGINX server?

      Reply
      • David Clark
        August 6, 2014 at 11:15 am

        You can check this help http://serverfault.com/questions/154264/nginx-rewrite-rules-for-joomla . It work well for me. But in the bottom line I highly recommend you use Apache for joomla, I face to too many problems when I use nginx. I am using nginx only as proxy cache of apache, so everything ‘s perfect with static files is served by nginx and dynamic process is served by apache + php.

        Reply
        • Phan Phieu
          August 10, 2014 at 9:11 am

          Thanks David Clark!

          I am using VPS for my joomla and search the best solutions for optimizing my website.
          In fact, I trying to use NGINX, it ‘s not easy to run smoothly.
          Could you guide me step by stem install Apache + NGINX proxy cache of apache and necessary component for optimizing to run Joomla website that you are using?

          Best regards.

          Reply
    4. Phong Ly
      August 31, 2014 at 4:40 am

      Thank you for the great list, David Pham! I active GZip Compression and Cache, but my site are more sluggish. Thus, I must active Compression and optimize Cache on my host. This takes a better result. I use JCH-Optimize – a good plugin, too. Use 3 simple steps, I speed up my site to 230% (page load time reduces from 5.71 second to 2.48 second). I’m researching the optimal methods to speed up my site. My method is shared in the post: http://vandon.com.vn/joomla/18363-guide-you-to-optimize-to-speed-up-your-joomla-website-quickly-and-efficaciously . Hope you like them.

      Reply
    5. Hadmed
      December 17, 2014 at 9:11 am

      That ‘s cool instruction, just move to your hosting in suggestion and it get 2x faster. After doing some remain optimization steps, it may up to 10x now. You save my customers a lot. Thanks man

      Reply

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