7 tips to improve Joomla website performance [part 2]

To continue with the tips to improve Joomla website performance, in the previous part, I had introduced how to use caching and .htaccess Optimization Rules, in this part, I will show you some other tips and hope you find it useful.

Joomla Compression

This is also an effective feature to optimize your website performance. When you enable this feature, the web page will be compressed and of course, the compressed page will take less time to load. Here is the way to enable Joomla Compression:

1. Go to System and choose Global configuration.

1. Select Server, press the Yes button next to Gzip Page Compression label.

1. click Save button, there will be a message returned to inform Joomla compression enable.

Image Optimization

Images seem to be used a lot in websites so if you want to escalate loading time on page, don’t ignore optimizing images with some tips like:

• Large images are never recommended, let’s scale them in HTML by height/width.
• You can use some useful online and offline tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Gimp, Smush to optimize images

Performance Optimization Extensions

Besides taking advantages of Joomla inbuilt features, you can also optimize your Joomla website by Joomla extensions. You can choose free or premium Joomla extensions available on market.

Removing Unnecessary and Unoptimized Extensions

Extensions are the crucial part for a website to extended the functionality of the website. But those extensions will consume resources such as database or storage. There is one fact that people usually forget clean-up extensions after they test different plugins, modules, and components, as the results, loading time will increase. You know that not all extensions are built with optimized code, so before downloading, let’s go through the user reviews to avoid unoptimized extensions.

Update Joomla Extensions

Like other open sources, Joomla is usually updated to add new features and eliminate all the limitations of the previous version by adding new code and optimizing existing code. So, don’t hesitate to use new updated version for your website. Extensions of Joomla may be a template, component, plugin or module. The outdated extensions, sometimes, will be incompatible with current version of Joomla. Reducing speed of a website is just a problem, the more serious one is a conflict issue.

Using Content Delivery Networks

This system of interconnected cache servers makes use of geographical proximity for content delivery. CDN will shorten the distance between visitors and server which deliver your content. It is especially suitable for web owners who usually work with audio, video, and image files because instead of loading via the server, that file will be loaded from CDN. You can choose among the most popular content delivery networks: MaxCDN, CDN77.com, CloudFlare, CacheFly, etc.

Web Hosting

Another factor will affect the performance of your website is a server it is deployed. Therefore, finding a fast and reliable web hosting service is so important. In case you have hired shared web hosting services, performance will depend on the processing power assigned to your website. Thus, with shared hosting, you only should choose when you can make sure that it will get enough processing power to quickly respond to a request. You can use cloud hosting because it is fast but it will charge you some fees, sometimes, quite expensive.