Speed Up Your Joomla Site!

Often we hear: "How can I make my Joomla site go faster?" quite alot.  With a few simple adjustments you can see some dramatic improvements in your sites speed.

• Host with a highly rated company.
• Cache your site.
• Remove unneeded extensions and modules.
• Use a fast lightweight template.
• Use an uptime monitoring service.

A good hosting company makes a difference.

The speed and server configuration can have a big effect on your site speed.  If you are on an older server or the host has a slow connection the your site will always be slower.  Look for a well know established hosting company.  Check out our Joomla Hosting Reviews or our Editor Top Picks.

If you like your hosting company but think you could be on a slow server, ask your host about the specs of your server.  If the server is older see if they can move your web site to a faster server.  Most hosting companies would rather move you to a faster server than loose the account.  If you host is unhelpful it may be time to switch hosts.  There are too many excellent hosts to stay with a bad one.

Uptime Monitoring Services

An uptime monitor will not make your site go faster but it will tell you when your site goes down and how fast the pages are being served when the site is up.  A good uptime monitor should allow you to check as often as every minute, have several methods of notification when the site goes down, and provides you with nice uptime and response time graphs.

There are several good uptime monitors.  Pingdom does a great job.

Joomla Caching Options

Definition of Cache.

Joomla 1.5 has a great cache built into the core.  It is so good that sometimes elements that you do not want cached are.  Joomlatwork.com has created Joomla Accelerate which is a great cache extension.  It is a paid extension but give you a good interface to work with and many option about turning the cache off on particular pages.

Remove unneeded code and extensions.

If you are not using the extension or module on your site you may want to remove it.  The more extensions you have on your site the more potential security holes you could have.  If it is not needed uninstall it.  You can always reinstall it if needed.

Use a good clean, lightweight template

What do we mean by lightweight? One that does not has a lot of extra javasrcipt features or large images.  Many of the leading template clubs make some really spiffy templates.  They look great on the demo servers and you can just see all of the possibilites for your site.  These fancy templates take lots of work and content to properly implement.  Often times you are left with only have of the features implemented.

Either start with a simple template add feature as you go or remove all of the uneeded javasript from the features you did not implement.

The more you reduce the images and javascript information the faster your site will display.

You want to see your Joomla site go faster.  We all do.  Follow these tips and you will see an improvement in your site.