General comments on using our Joomla templates to their maximum effectiveness
While creating a website, a few issues have to be remembered in order to make it efficient and proper loading time. Joomla! is specific environment that the multitude of extensions available cause that users forget about consequences of adding more functionalities to their websites.
Images
First of all, attention has to be paid to a number of images loaded with a website. It often happens that we allow a lot of images and thumbnails to be loaded which may cause slower website’s loading. In the case when you have content too much extended and you do not want to resign from it, it is worth considering template’s optimization itself, e.g. by replacing heavy images to more lightweight ones.
Scripts
If we use on our website a lot of extensions, probably each of them has its own scripts and join additional frameworks to the website (usually MooTools or jQuery). In the first place, it is worth removing duplicating frameworks and generally using those with the same framework (framework itself takes a more than ten additional kilobytes of data to load).
Cache
Cache is an extremely important option, especially on websites with a huge number of visits. Therefore, an appropriate cache time has to be set for our website and modules, e.g. it is worth setting cache for more than ten minutes for News Show Pro GK4 module – then it will not be generating articles thumbnails each time, you will load a site. The same is with extensions like: GK Weather or GK Stock; both extensions are based on external API and this data loading may take some seconds which extends the process of site’s loading. Thanks to cache use, data will be loaded every more than ten/several dozen of visits.
Other
Other ways of template’s optimization is a reasonable number of categories or processed resources generated, e.g. a website which has few thousands of categories will not load very quickly if we load News Show Pro module which loads last articles from all these categories – in this case, categories’ layout has to be planned in order not to force a module to create too extended SQL requests which, later on, are being made for a long time on a server.
Internet user distance from our website’s server is also very important. There is Content Delivery Network (CDN) services available which are more and more popular (e.g. Amazon Cloud Front) and are of moderate price. Thanks to CDN use, a user receives data from the nearest server.
If further optimization is required read this article: Speed Up your site, Faster webpage loading or .htaccess tricks
This article was first published
