Make your Joomla 3 site silky smooth and efficient
It’s been two years since Google announced that page speed is a factor in its search ranking. Google’s position is that faster-loading pages should be ranked higher because they provide a better experience for users. We also fully agree with this idea, because all available stats show that page load speeds can impact pageviews per visit by up to 50%. That’s why we prepared few useful tips how to speed up you Joomla 3.1 website.
Measure Joomla 3.x Load Speed
This first step will provide a baseline measurement from which you can work to improve. Two good tools for measuring page load speeds are Pingdom Page Load Time tool and Google Analytics Site Speed reports.
How to Improve Your Joomla 3.x Speed
- Upgrade your PHP & MySQL version if it’s possible.
- Enable Gzip (in Global Configuration)- Gzip will significantly compress the size of the page sent to the browser which then uncompresses the information and displays it for the user. Many Joomla sites who use Gzip are able to reduce the file size by upwards of 40%.
- Uninstall all unnecessary extensions (including plugins).
- Delete all trashed menu items, categories and articles. This will allow you to reduce the total size of the database.
- Minimize HTTP Requests – this means reducing the number of items that need to be loaded, such as scripts, style sheets, and images.
- Optimize your code and image files.
- Optimize your database, for this job use a database tool like phpMyAdmin and:
- Select all tables and REPAIR tables
- Select all tables and OPTIMIZE tables
- Find all the large tables and examine them to find which can be emptied or cleaned up – especially if they came from an old unnecessary extension.
- Find all the finger_terms table and empty them. This is the main reason why Joomla 3.1 websites get really slow when limited resources are available.
Google has a good list of helpful articles for optimizing your page speed here.
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