Speed Up Joomla – Full Tutorials
by David Pham • 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.
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.
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:
- Resize images – never upload 2560×1600 pictures
- Smush your images
- Minify and combine CSS and JS files
- Use image sprites
Sounds Nice, How Do I Begin?
- Use smush.it
- Photoshop/Fireworks
- Joomla! Extensions
Here are some optimization image/css/js extension with high rating on internet for joomla
- JCH Optimize – Combines JS and CSS, Combines images in sprites, Minify and Compress (THE MOST RATING)
- Jbetolo – same as above but + CDN support
- JotCache – improves the Joomla! built in Core Cache
- 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:
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########## Begin - ETag Optimization ## This rule will create an ETag for files based only on the modification ## timestamp and their size. This works wonders if you are using rsync'ed ## servers, where the inode number of identical files differs. ## Note: It may cause problems on your server and you may need to remove it FileETag MTime Size ########## End - ETag Optimization ########## Begin - Automatic compression of resources # Compress text, html, javascript, css, xml, kudos to Komra.de # May kill access to your site for old versions of Internet Explorer # The server needs to be compiled with mod_deflate otherwise it will send HTTP 500 Error. # mod_deflate is not available on Apache 1.x series. Can only be used with Apache 2.x server. # AddOutputFilterByType is now deprecated by Apache. Use mod_filter in the future. AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/javascript application/x-javascript ########## Begin - Optimal default expiration time ## Note: this might cause problems and you might have to comment it out by ## placing a hash in front of this section's lines # Enable expiration control ExpiresActive On # Default expiration: 1 hour after request ExpiresDefault "now plus 1 hour" # CSS and JS expiration: 1 week after request ExpiresByType text/css "now plus 1 week" ExpiresByType application/javascript "now plus 1 week" ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "now plus 1 week" # Image files expiration: 1 month after request ExpiresByType image/bmp "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/gif "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/jp2 "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/pipeg "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/png "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/tiff "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/ico "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/icon "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType text/ico "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/ico "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/vnd.wap.wbmp "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/vnd.wap.wbxml "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/smil "now plus 1 month" # Audio files expiration: 1 month after request ExpiresByType audio/basic "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/mid "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/midi "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/mpeg "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/x-aiff "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/x-mpegurl "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/x-pn-realaudio "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/x-wav "now plus 1 month" # Movie files expiration: 1 month after request ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType x-world/x-vrml "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/x-msvideo "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/mpeg "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/mp4 "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/quicktime "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/x-la-asf "now plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/x-ms-asf "now plus 1 month" ########## End - Optimal expiration time RewriteRule ^templates\/your_template_folder/ - [L] ## I found this necessary for @fontface fonts RewriteRule ^templates\/your_template_folder\/fonts/ - [L] ##Yoo Themes Widgetkit and Zoo will not display css styles or images correctly if the cache folder access is blocked RewriteRule ^cache\/widgetkit/ - [L] RewriteRule ^cache\/com_zoo/ - [L] RewriteRule ^cache\/com_templates/ - [L] RewriteRule ^cache\/template/ - [L] RewriteRule ^cache\/plg_jch_optimize/ - [L] |
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.
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