3 Tips to Make Your Joomla Site Load Faster

This post is for Joomla users.  If you aren’t a Joomla user, you are going to be all like, “what-the-fudge is this mumbo jumbo?”  Basically, this post details how to optimize your Joomla site so that you can make your pages load quicker.  Word.

Making a Joomla based site faster:

First, these tips are for those folks that have a Joomla based website that has dynamic content.  In other words, your content changes each time you load your site.  Perhaps your site is dynamic because it is set to announce new users online or randomly display images or content.  If your site has static content, content that remains the same for long periods of time you should look into an extension geared to help improve your page-load times.  Second, these tips are for folks using Joomla 1.0 Native versions.  In 1.5 you can apply these techniques; you will simply approach them in the Global Configuration differently.

Cache

What is it?  Cache pronounced ‘cash’ is French in website lingo for: where webpages are stored in the backend--a virtual junk in the trunk if you will.  Seriously though, In Joomla! based websites there is a ‘cache’ folder where all these pages are stored for a set period of time.  Cache is a key way to speed up a website and here is how in Joomla! site. 

Global Configuration:  In the site administration find the ‘Global Configuration’ section and befriend it.  You will notice a tab for, you guessed it, ‘Cache.’  In the Cache tab make sure you have selected ‘yes’ to caching.  This is your first step to streamlining your site.  Next, you can change the time frame that you cache your site.  This time frame is based in seconds.  If you have a lot of dynamic content, like commented articles and many pages to view, I would suggest keeping this figure low--900 seconds (15 minutes) or less.  If you have a site that isn’t updated often and has static or unchanging content you can keep this figure high—50,000 seconds isn’t unreasonable.

Don’t these cached files eat up space in your server?   Yes, but not a great deal of space at all.  Monitor the amount of available space you have before you begin allowing caching.   If you don’t have a ton of space and you want to speed up your site—get more space, period. 

Modules:   To really impact your site and how quickly your site loads, you will need to make sure every single module that you are using has ‘cache’ enabled.  This is probably the best way to speed up your site as it will greatly reduce the amount of database queries your site has to do to pull up content (see a good thing).  Also, any modules that are unpublished and not of any use—delete them (unless they are core, and it those cases you can’t). 

Statistics

I know you want to keep site statistics, but there are many external tools that are great for generating data that don’t bog down your site and make pages load slowly.  So, let’s see how we can make your site run faster by tweaking your statistics in the administrative Global Configuration.

Global Configuration:  In the site administration find the ‘Global Configuration’ section like you did for Cache and find the tab entitled ‘Statistics.’  Once you are in the tab simply select ‘no’ to all the options.  Quick, easy and will help your site load pages faster.

You and Your SQL Database

In the database you can help maximize your site further.  I use GoDaddy as my hosting company and I will tell you how I access my “My SQL” databases and you can apply this to your company.

My SQL Database:  First, login to your hosting account and access the control panel.  Once in, find the ‘Database’ tab and select ‘MySQL.’  Select the database in question and select ‘Open Manager.’  Once logged into the database, find the table titled ‘jos_session’ and click it.  It will open up and depending on the version of MySQL you have, you will be able to either utilize a drop down menu or it may even be already open where you can select “optimize table.”  Other tables worth optimizing on a fairly regular basis, once a month or more depending on the traffic your site receives are jos_users, jos_content, and jos_modules.  I suggest you back-up your database each time before you mess with it, better safe than sorry. 

I hope these tips are useful to someone out there.  If they are, drop a comment and let me know. If you have more to add, also leave a comment.