speed

Keep Your Joomla! Site Lightning Fast!

Joomla!® is one of the top 3 CMS solutions in the world. The power of Joomla lies in the many available extensions. If you need a certain functionality in Joomla that it doesn’t have by default, there is a large chance that one of the 7000+ extensions will provide you with the solution.

Want a commenting system? There are extensions for that. Want advanced SEO functionality? Plenty of extensions for that too. Need a fancy poll? Want a forum? Should your site be a community portal? All possible with the help of extensions.

But there is a downside to all these extensions and that is speed. There is nothing holding you back to install tens or hundreds of extensions. And before you know it you find yourself in the middle of an “extension frenzy”. And with every extra feature you add to Joomla you will most likely also require extra server power and processing time. In other words, Joomla sites packed with extensions tend to slow down. People leave your site because it has become so slow.

Luckily, there are some great solutions for this problem. Here are some techniques that will make sure Joomla is running at its full potential.

Joomla extensions come in different forms: components, modules, plugins, template…

 

Components & Modules

It is great to play around with all the fabulous power components and modules can offer you. Especially with modules you can dress up your pages to have countless functionalities. But keep in mind that more is often less. Less in performance and efficiency of not only your page loads, but also of the user experience and revenue!

So try to only use the extensions you really need. And uninstall everything you don’t use. Don’t just disable them, uninstall them!

 

Plugins: friend or foe?

Plugins are great to add all sorts of functionality to your site. They are loaded and executed at different stages of the page rendering process. In most cases you don’t even know what plugins have been doing there thing. And there lies the danger!

When your website has a lot of plugins installed, they will slow down your site. Especially if these 3rd party plugins are not coded efficiently. Unfortunately – unless you are a programmer – you have no real way of telling if extensions are coded well

So plugins are your friends and can turn your site into something fantastic. But if you are not careful with them, they can group up and become your foe by slowing your site down.

 

Template madness

There are hundreds of thousands of Joomla templates out there. Varying from very simple to extremely extensive ones. But also from very well to very poorly programmed ones.

Be careful in choosing your template. With more functionality also comes more server load.

Also many templates are packed with images. Especially if these images are not optimized, this will have a drastic effect on your page load speed. But luckily you can fix that yourself!

 

Out-of-date and out-of-touch

Technology never stops. And neither does the development and improvement of Joomla and its extensions.

Make sure you keep up-to-date with the latest releases of Joomla. Keep track of new versions of the extensions you use.

Also make your host use the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. And that the server is setup correctly and is maintained.

Staying up-to-date will not only help you in keeping your website up to speed, but also it will protect you from known security issues.

 

Database: time to clean up!

MySQL databases are normally very efficient. But sometimes databases can gather junk and even become corrupted. This can slow down your site and even make it unreachable.

There are fortunately ways to fix this, or better yet, prevent it. You simply have to ‘repair’ your database tables.

Most hosting providers will offer you access to your database(s) via phpMyAdmin, a mysql web interface. There you can select your database tables and tell it to repair them.

There is a great Joomla extension that will help you do this right from your Joomla administrator: Admin Tools. It will also provide you with other great tools to keep your website nice and clean.

If you want to be really geeky, you can also set up a cronjob script to repair your database regularly.

 

Cache: use it!

Joomla has a built in content caching system. This will take all dynamic content, cache it, and deliver the cached content to your unregistered viewers.

Caching will prevent your components, modules and plugins to have to do the same thing on every page load. This will reduce server load significantly.

 

Content Delivery Networks (CDN): take load off your server!

A lot of your server power and page load time is taken up by loading the different images, stylesheets, scripts and other files your website requires. A CDN will take that load of your own server and offer these files from a different server close to the visitor. The page load speed will improve dramatically because there are multiple servers serving the necessary files simultaneously.

There is an excellent Joomla plugin called CDN for Joomla!, created by NoNumber! (Peter van Westen). Not only does CDN for Joomla! fully support MaxCDN, you have a variety of options on how to use this CDN extension. And best of all, CDN for Joomla! is 100% free!

There’s some of our tips on how to speed up Joomla! Do you have any more tips on how to speed up Joomla, leave them in the comments below!

How To: Optimizing Your Web Images

As the Internet is continuing to get pretty with all kinds and gradients and images, it is increasing the size of images used in many websites dramatically. Even though there are many technologies like CSS3′s gradient capabilities to help you use fewer images, you won’t see any significant differences until you start optimizing your images.

Even though there aren’t too many ways to optimize your images, there are many techniques used in Photoshop to optimize your images. For this test, we’ll be spending the majority of our time in Photoshop.

 

File Format Differences

 

Let’s face it, there are so many ways to save your images in Photoshop. But if you’ve been using the “Save As” feature in Photoshop to save your web images, you should know you’re already saving a very unoptimized file.

As most people are already aware of the PNG, JPEG, and GIF file formats, let’s point out the differences. Keep in mind that the JPEG format will typically always have a lower file size, but the quality of the file is sporadic depending on the file.

JPEG wins hands down in terms of file size for a normal photo. At 30% quality, JPEG seems to have the highest lead (in terms of image compression/file size), but in order to exaggerate one downfall of the JPEG format, images are very distorted. The JPEG file format has some quality issues at a lower quality percentage. If we create the same image at 60%, quality is increased by a ton, but the issues are still visible. Even the JPEG format at 100% is not the highest file size and looks crystal clear.

After the JPEG format, you can see one of the leading file formats on the web, PNG-8 (which means it’ll pick from a maximum of 256 colors), coming right after. Because it is much larger than the JPEG format, it also has one downfall, there are many visible “dots” on the image.

The GIF format is very much like PNG, but is less optimized when using very large images like the one we’re testing. It suffers from the same issues that PNG does.

Our last two images, the PNG-24 files, are much like the JPEG format at 100% quality, but with supporting transparency. Keep in mind that the JPEG format does not support transparency, and because of this, JPEG images are not used as the main theme files of many websites.

 

So what… what should we use?

In actuality, there’s no easy rule to decide which format every image should be saved as. Every image format has its issues but with those issues, we can narrow them down on which type of files should be used for what. Most of this is truly up to you and what you think is best. We can’t tell you which one is the best, but what we can do is guide you in the right direction in picking the best file format.

But please keep in mind, the one with the lowest file size isn’t always the best image format.

  • If you want the highest quality, use a JPEG at around 80% quality or a PNG-24. These will be fairly large file sizes, but there are some cases where a PNG-24 image (even with transparency) has a lower file size than a JPEG at 100% quality. You simply need to compare the two formats.
  • JPEGs are best used with pictures taken by a camera, as they contain many colors that the JPEG format excels at compressing.
  • If you are using minimum colors, compare the GIF and PNG-8 image formats. They are very similar, but it seems that GIF is great with small images and PNG-8 is great with lots of colors at a small size. Again, you need to experiment and compare.
  • If you need any kind of transparency, PNG-24 has the best compatibility. The edges of the image are very smooth, unlike GIF and PNG-8, but most of the time, the file size will be raised by quite a bit; use sparingly.

When in doubt, rate every image format on the basis of file size and quality. After that, you should have the best image format for the image you are working on.

 

Seriously, this is a lot of work! Any easier method?

If you’re using WordPress for your website, there is a handy plug-in called WP Smush.it that will do all of this hard work for you.

Essentially, it’ll take all of the unneeded data in JPG files that your camera stores, optimizing the compression of a JPEG file, converting some GIFs to PNGs to save some space, and remove some unneeded colors from GIFs or PNGs.

No matter what way you use to optimize your files, it is needed. You want your website to load quickly, users want to see a fast website, and search engines will rank your website higher as your site is loading faster.

Images slow a website down more than anything else and there are many ways to make sure your website will load faster, but image optimization is key to a fast loading website.

 

Anything Else?

Please keep in mind that because images are fairly large, the download time is very much tied to how fast your server can handle requests and the time taken to transmit a file to the requested user. As you have many things loading on a typical website, like JavaScript, HTML, images, and more, all of these HTTP requests will slow down the server at some point.

One excellent way to stop this from happening is by hosting your main files, like your images and JavaScript files, somewhere else. This is one example of how our CDN services can speed up your website, the other reason being that we have a high class network and state of the art servers with Enterprise SSD drives that will serve your files in the fastest way possible to your users.

If you are willing to combine all your images together, typically your theme images used for your website, you can create a CSS spritemap and the user can download your images used on your website with only one HTTP request! CSS spritemaps are fairly simple, and there are even tools that can help you with the process; they’re something every web-designer should look into.

If you have never optimized any of your images, it may be a good time to take a look at what is slowing down your website.

How To: Speed Up Your Website With WebPageTest

When you are wanting to increase the speed of your website, there are plenty of different areas to look at. It could be that your server’s internet connection is slow, your website is taking too long to process on the server, too many unoptimized files, or even some JavaScript could be hanging the site from loading correctly. Whether the case, WebPageTest will help speed up your website to its full potential.

Before we get far into this guide, whether it is certain that MaxCDN will speed up your website, other things can slow down your website as well. Likewise, having services like WebPageTest help quite a bit.

Step One: Using WebPageTest

 

Before you can figure out how to speed up your website, you first need to give WebPageTest the information it needs.

Different Tests: WebPageTest is one impressive service with all of their offered tests. They offer a very in-depth review of a website, comparing websites, and a fairly unique mobile testing feature which seems to powered by an external service. We’ll be focusing on the in-depth review of a website in this guide.

The Basics: You’ll see all the basic items at the very top of the interface. Here, you can enter what website you want to have the page test on, choosing from twenty-four locations to run your test from (we’d recommend for you to use Dulles, VA USA as it supports many options), and of course, what browser you wish to test your website on.

Advanced Settings: Despite all of their different tests, they’ve gone the next level with plenty of advanced options that’ll blow any other website speed test out of the water. With all of fourteen different settings you may set, let’s cover some of the major ones:

  • Changing the downstream connection (and yes, FiOS is in there!)
  • Altering the number of tests to run
  • Getting the tcpdump (this if for all you tech-savvy people!)
  • And even entering HTTP basic authentication details

Read More…

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