
5 stars based on 120+ reviews on Google
Is your Joomla website running slow? There are a variety of reasons why your Joomla website is slow to load and we go through a range of different areas to check to ensure your site's speed doesn’t become an issue for your users or Google.
Your website's speed has a dramatic impact on user's experience and rankings within search engines. Speed is a factor used within Google’s search algorithm, so if your website is loading sluggishly, chances are your website isn’t going to rank very well (particularly if your competitors' websites are zipping along nice and quickly).
Google uses something called Lighthouse Performance Scoring to determine how well a website performs, particularly in the area of speed and loading times. The PageSpeed Insights tool will help you to determine areas of your website that might be contributing to slower speeds. More on that later.
It’s important to have your website load quickly as users don’t hang around very long if they have to wait for pages to load.
According to a study completed by Akamai and Forrester Research:
Think about that for a moment. The amount of time it took you to read that last sentence is how much time you have for your website to load before a user will abandon it and either perform a different search query or navigate to a competitor's website.
Before we dive into how to make a Joomla website faster, we should evaluate our website to see if we need to make some adjustments. There are several tools available to evaluate a website's speed and to test what changes might possibly need to be made. Here’s a rundown.
This tool will tell you all the items you might need to tweak on your website to improve its speed. Whilst this is a great tool, I personally think that some of the filters are set very high. This means most websites will typically get a score of between 60-90.
Some of the errors you will no doubt see using this tool will be:-
As the article goes on we will show you how to improve on these items and get your Joomla website running fast.
This is another great tool to look over your site and see what files and images might be chewing up server load and slowing down your website. This tool will list all the files and images it can crawl and tell you their size and how long it took to download them.
This is also a great tool for optimising images.
This is probably one of the most thorough tools available to give you information on how to optimise your website. It will tell you a range of different files and images that need to be optimised or updated.
The tools listed above are designed to help you make improvements on your site. By adding your website address to these tools will will start to get a picture of the areas you may need to focus on to improve website speed.
There are some general rules for making sure your website runs fast, regardless of the content management system it’s running. Below are some general things to keep an eye on with your website.
Like most things in life, you get what you pay for. Sure there’s cheap-as-chips hosting out there, however, it’s likely to have pretty ordinary speeds when it comes to load times for your website.
If you want to check how fast your hosting is, you can run a ‘time to first byte’ (TTFB) check using an online tool like https://www.bytecheck.com. This tool measures the time it takes for your server to respond with the first byte of information.
Think of it like reaction time when driving or how quickly a sprinter gets off the blocks in a race. The faster your TTFB time, the faster your hosting is likely to be.
If you want to switch hosting providers, we offer Joomla web hosting – fast, secure reliable hosting for your website.
Many hosting providers – particularly if they’re running Cpanel, will offer website optimisation tools like Litespeed Web Cache Manager. It’s advisable to turn these tools on and test your website once operating them to see if they have a positive impact on website speed.
Large image sizes are one of the most common reasons websites run slow. When talking about images it’s important to note there are two types of sizes – image size (how wide or high an image is) and file size (how many kilobytes an image is). To optimise a website for speed you want to ensure your image file size is as small as possible.
How large should images be for a website?
As a general rule of thumb, we recommend your images be no larger than 400-500kb in file size. There are some great online tools that can help you reduce the sizes of your images.
One that we use regularly here in the Marketeam office is TinyJPG. This tool will crunch down a 4MB photo to around 300kb with no image loss and best of all… it’s free!
If you’re interested in learning more about images for your website, take a look at our blog post The ultimate guide to using images for your website.
How can I find out the size of images being used on my website?
There’s a range of different tools you can use to discover the size of the images being used on your website. One of the best tools to do this is the Xenu Link Sleuth tool.
This tool will crawl your entire site – pages, images, application files, etc, then you will be able to download the crawl information as a .CSV file.
Once you’ve opened it in your favourite spreadsheet program, you can sort by size, go through your list of images and find out which ones are too large.
And… it’s also an incredible tool for finding broken links on your website.
Turning on Joomla cache is another very easy way to add a little speed to your site. It’s a simple case of going into your Global Configuration settings, clicking on the System tab and under the Cache heading you have a couple of cache settings.
I usually set mine to ‘Progressive Caching’ and change the ‘Cache Time’ to 60.
Another easy setting within the Global Configuration of your Joomla website. Click on the ‘Server’ tab and under ‘Server Settings’ there’s a button to enable Gzip Page Compression.
This is a simple case of clicking on Extensions / Plugin Manager and searching for the term ‘cache’ in the search box. Simply enable the plugin and you’re good to go!
You can try adding this code to your htacces file. This will cache the types of files that are listed in the code below:-
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
FileETag MTime Size
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/javascript application/x-javascript
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
ExpiresByType font/truetype "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType font/opentype "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/x-font-woff "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/vnd.ms-fontobject "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access plus 600 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
</IfModule>
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"
</FilesMatch>
A CDN stands for a content delivery network and essentially distributes your website to different servers around the world so that end users can access a copy of your site from that server instead of the server it was originally set up on. This means faster speeds and quicker download times for users.
Take a look at this image to get an idea of how it works:-
There’s a bunch of added security features to setting up a website on Cloudflare and the best thing is it’s free!
Hopefully this has given you some areas to concentrate on to help speed up your Joomla website.
Remember if you’re still having trouble, we offer Joomla website support services so feel free to contact us and we would be more than happy to conduct a speed audit on your website and help get your site running fast.
5 stars based on 120+ reviews on Google