10 minutes to speed up your Joomla 4 website

You can be running a Joomla site and no matter, if it is a personal or an enterprise Ecommerce, one of the most important things, is how fast it is for your site to load but it is really hard to have your site running with a good performance, isn't it? 

There are many things that can be done in order to make this possible. We are going to list them all here with suggestions on how to achieve it and, of course, with a tool that will allow you to achieve almost everything.

a lot of studies explain how the speed load will improve your sales and conversion rate, the first thing when thinking on this that we have to keep in mind is how much our site should take to load so in order to reply to this and based on the google suggestions and many other studies, in order to have a good conversion rate, your site should load in max 2 seconds as after more or less 2.5 seconds your Ecommece could lose potential customers.

That's a good statistics table where you can see how the load time could affect your conversion rate.

So first of all, we need to know our current Joomla site performance, for this, there are multiple tools that you can use starting with the most popular tool PageSpeed Insights:

• PageSpeed Insights
• GTMetrix
  
• Tool Pingdom
  
• WebPageTest
  

Let's proceed with explaining the performance suggestions.

 Choose a quality Hosting service

Using a good hosting service is one of the most important things that we should keep in mind when starting our business as depending on the Hosting there are many tools that will help you to speed up things, install your site, and also could improve your site performance.

The hosting server is in charge of serving your site to the end-user so choosing the wrong Hosting service will cause a delay between the time when a user types your domain in the URL tab and the time when the browser starts receiving info to print your site, there are multiple things that apply here like if there are enough resources, if there are too many extensions causing issues in your site or if maybe the cache is not set correctly.

 Setup the Joomla Cache

Joomla has a default cache tool that you can use to improve your site performance by preloading all your content so it doesn't have to download again many of the site elements.

It is also important to set the Cache interval to be cleared at least after 30 minutes.

Those can be easily fixed using Speed Cache by clicking on Fix it Now, it will fix it to the recommended configurations automatically.

 Gzip Compression

The Gzip compression is an HTTP Compression Method that will allow you to serve smaller versions of your text files making them faster to be transferred to the end-user.

This can be easily fixed by using the Speed Cache extension, you only click on fix it now and it will be automatically fixed.

 Use the latest Joomla version

Having your site to the last version is always important as on each update important things are fixed that could cause performance issues and, usually, the performance, in general, is improved so keeping this up to date will always help your site performance, it is also important to use always the last technologies to be sure that your site will be always compatible with all the extensions update.

This is the same for 3rd party extensions, you should keep in mind having those always up to date.

 Keep only the extensions that you need

One of the things that could cause more performance issues is the number of extensions that you could have so having those at the minimum possible is a really good idea so removing these extensions that are not really used and using only the minimum amount of them as each extension means more code for your site to load when it is serving a site and more code means more content to download to your end-user browser.

 Minify and group your site files

There is a feature from SpeedCache that will allow you to MInify and Group your site files really quick and in a fast way, this will basically compress your CSS and JS files at their minimum version removing spaces and mixing one or more files into one to serve them quickly and without overloading your site.

For this, go to Components > SpeedCache > Group & Minify, you'll see all the options to enable with a description when you hover over the option.

 Use a CDN

A CDN will allow you to serve your files from different servers around the world so the user will download the files from the one that is closest to them.

SpeedCache has a module that will allow you to easily set it using quick enable/disable options with a text box to add all the file extensions that you want to serve from the CDN(JPG, PNG, CSS, JS).

 Expire Headers

This feature is really helpful as it will tell the browser when to serve files from the browser cache or not so your site won't be broken serving files that are not supposed to be cached.

When it is not enabled, SpeedCache will allow you to fix it with a simple fix it now button.

 Optimize your images loading

The images are a really important part of your site but on the other hand, the images are one of the causes for your site to have a big size so having those optimized is good advice for your performance.

There are two things that we can achieve to have this optimized, these are to compress your images and use the Lazy Load.

Compress images

This will, basically, make your images of a smaller size without losing the quality, for this, SpeedCache has integration with ImageRecycle, SpeedCache also comes with a 20% off coupon to get your images optimized with the best optimization images tool.

LazyLoad

The LazyLoad is a feature that allows you to load the images only when these are shown on your screen meaning that, for example, normally your site download all the images but with LazyLoad if the first screenprint(the part of your site that is shown when you load your site) only has one image, it will only download one image in the first screen and while you scroll down, it will be downloading all other images.

This can be easily enabled with SpeedCache under SpeedCache > Configuration > Parameters.

 Conclusion

There are many tools with many options to check your performance and also to improve it, using the right tools will allow you not just to speed up your site performance but you will also be able to speed your work time as, for example, SpeedCache has handy tools that will allow you to fix all these performance issues with no more than one click.

You can check good tips as well following this post to speed up your Joomla site.

Start using SpeedCache to improve your speed and your conversion rate as well ;)