13 ways to speed up Joomla

Written by Sudhi | 23 April 2009

Joomla is powerful, to say the least. It can create a simple brochure site, a real estate listing database, or a dynamic and robust community portal. With all that power comes a sometimes slow, clunky website. If your site is running slow, try these tricks to speed it up.

Statistics

Joomla has a built-in statistic function, but it puts a significant load on your server. Try using Google Analytics or a comparable service. Most are free, and all of them take 99% of the load off of your server. Many of them are more robust that the Joomla statistics anyway.

GZip

In the global configuration of your Joomla! site, you have the ability to tell Joomla! to automatically zip pages which reduces bandwidth usage. It does take CPU power to zip the files, so sometimes this doesn't work. But try it out and see if it makes your site load faster.

Templates

Joomla has some very nice templates. Many of those nice templates rely on a lot of images to look great. Each separate image creates a new server request and that can really bog down your website. Think about slimming down your template to use less images. Tools like WebsiteGrader count your images, among other search engine friendly attributes.

Components

Some components may be really helpful, or even vital to your website's purpose. But many of them really slow down your site's load speed. JoomlaPerformance.com suggests using their page caching component to check load speed of each page.

Caching

Consider using a 3rd Party (3pd) component to cache your pages or enable the core caching function. This could greatly speed up your site by preventing a new server request for each page load.

Bad Queries

Enable debug mode in the backend, and find out which functions of your site are creating bad queries. Commercially developed or regularly updated extensions shouldn't be creating many bad queries, but if you see one that is slowing the site down, think about an alternative extension.

Bridges

Bridges are bad for Joomla! performance. Despite the added functionality, you're essentially running two cores at any given time. So whenever possible, find a true Joomla extension instead of a bridge.

Upgrade

Has it been a long time since you opened your hosting account? Hosts make money when you don't rock the boat. That means you may be stuck on an old server unless you request an updated one with a faster processor, more RAM and more storage. Think about changing your hosting provider or even upgrading to a better account level with more assets.

Database

If you know Joomla!, you know it relies heavily on the database. Open up your database management tool like phpMyAdmin and click "optimize". This will optimize the database schema. I don't know what this means, but JoomlaPerformance.com does.

Images

In addition to minimizing the images used in your template, consider optimizing them for the web. This means using the appropriate type of image for the application, and keeping them small. Check out this resource for choosing the right image.

Code

Optimize your code by cutting out everything that is not being used. It may have a minimal impact, but it will still speed up your load time some. Consider running your code through a CSS cleanup tool or using JCE's code cleanup feature.

Update

The Joomla! Core Team is hard at work speeding up Joomla! wherever they can. In addition to the security issues, it is important to update to keep your Joomla! installation running like a top. As of the writing of this article, the latest Joomla! version is 1.5.10.

Favicon

Believe it or not, adding a favicon where there was none can actually speed up your site. See, whenever a browser tries to retrieve an image based on a call from html or css, and the image is not there - it creates a significant load on the server.

Do you have a technique for speeding up Joomla? Add it by commenting below!