Optimizing your Joomla site

I listened to the webinar on making your Joomla site speedy. I knew most of what was presented, but did learn a couple of interesting things. I'll outline them here in case you, like me, have holes in your optimization knowledge.

1. The most important way to keep your site fast and safe is to keep Joomla and all the extensions you use up to date. This is an imperative for protection from hackers as well as speed.
2. Disable and then uninstall unused extensions. First disable any extensions you do not think you are using. Wait a week or two, if there are no problems, then uninstall them. This will not only speed up your site, but will also make it safer from hackers
3. Switch to PHP 7. PHP 7 runs almost twice as fast as PHP 5.x It is one of the easiest speed increases you can do. All the sites that we host* and manage have been switched to PHP 7 months ago.
4. Make sure your images are sized properly. While you can just upload an image and put it on the site, if it is a huge file, then that whole file has to be sent to the browser and the page can take a long time to load. Besides resizing them, and saving your images for the web, try tinypng.com to further shrink your file size.
5. Turn on Joomla's built in caching in Global Configuration. How to do this exactly is beyond the scope of this update, but click here for a Joomla caching tutorial.
6. Turn on Gzip compression (Also in Global Configuration).

As you do each of these things, make sure you have a good backup and give each time to make sure there are no adverse effects on your site. I can tell you that implementing these has made a huge difference to the sites we manage.

* One other area outside of Joomla that can have a great effect on your site's performance is your hosting environment. For more information on our secure managed hosting, click here.