So, you want to speed up Joomla website?

When you installed Joomla, the speed from the site, is fantastic, it works like a rocket! But as your site grows bigger and bigger, with more plugins, modules and components, the siteperformance slows down more and more. In order to get your fast website back, here you'll find some tips and tricks in order to speed Joomla up.

CSS Cleanup

Make sure that your CSS files don't have definitions you don't use, also remove line-breaks. This will remove in a smaller CSS which will load faster!

Optimze graphics

Choose the right format for your graphics files and play around with the compression settings (in case of JPG for example, in most cases you can't see the difference between a JPG file saved with 90% compression  of 70%). The smaller these files will be, the faster your website will be loaded.

Enable Caching

By default caching is disabled in Joomla, enable it! Your website will  be a lot faster, but make sure everything works correctly with caching enabled.

Enable GZIP

Enabling GZIP Compression can result in a faster website, but it takes some CPU power, so try it out to see if it is for your the right option.

Disable Mootools and Caption

Default mootools.js and caption.js is loaded every time, which will cost you 70k bandwidth, but not always used. Use the utility, Mootools Control, which allows you to disable mootools and caption on load of your website.

Combine CSS and JS

JFinalizer is a plugin for Joomla which allowes you to combine sveral CSS/JS files into 1 file, which will result in less HTTP requests and a faster load time. Make sure to check everything works correctly because it can screw up things.

Google Analyics

For my own website staticstics, I use OpenPotion Asynchronous Google Analytics plugin for Joomla. This plugin will load the analytics scripts at the start in parallel of loading the website, loading the analytics script will be done when your website has loaded.

Faultless website

In the global configuration you can enable the level of fault-reporting, set it to the highest and check your website to see if it doesn't generate errors. If so, fix these, because these will slow down your website.

Joomla Database cleanup

Cleanup your database, the bigger the database of your website is, the longer it will take to get the data out of it. The smaller, the faster!

Not all the components are speed optimized

Enable/ Disable components, if your website still is slow, disable some components in order to find which slows it down.