Are you worried about your Joomla website's slow loading speed? Or do you want to optimize your Joomla website to boost your sales to the next level? This article is for you.
Joomla is ranked as the fourth most widely deployed open-source content management system (CMS), with a good reach of 3% online. Joomla website gets more than 2 TB of monthly traffic and currently holds a 2.7% market share. According to Joomla Statistics, over 300 websites are created on the CMS daily. Among these, 70% of websites have used Version 3 of Joomla. Joomla is very popular among online communities, various corporations, hundreds of magazines, government applications, and small businesses.
Joomla is still, and for a good reason. It is free to use. Secondly, creating a community with Joomla is super easy. Thirdly, unlike WordPress, Joomla comes with default multilingual capabilities. Fourthly, Joomla comes with built-in caching options and additional caching extensions. Fifthly, Joomla is straightforward to install and use. It would help if you hadUnlike WordPress, you need coding skills, technical knowledge, and full-time staff to use this content management system.
This is why many popular websites are using this powerful CMS. These include Linux.com, ITWire.com, Harvard - GSAS, The Eiffel Tower, United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, and MTV Greece. However, the question is how to optimize the Joomla website when it's not performing well. The answer is to optimize your website.
This article will share how you can speed up your website and skyrocket your sales. Let’s start by exploring some strategies to speed up our Joomla website.
Why website’s speed optimization is essential?
In today’s fast-paced digital marketing age, a swift, responsive, and efficient website is a necessity for every online business. Visitors are always in a hurry because you are not their only option. If a website takes a long time to load its content, it can adversely affect the user experience, website traffic, and rankings in search engines.
Websites highly optimized for performance and incorporating the latest features, such as WooCommerce show remaining stock always has an edge over slow websites. High-speed websites contribute to better user experience, improved conversion rates, and better search engine rankings in Google. Worry not. The Joomla platform comes with a default array of features and extensions designed to optimize your website's speed and performance.
7 Essential Techniques to Speed Up Joomla Website
There are many extensions and standard techniques you can add to supercharge your Joomla website. Some of these techniques are web-friendly mixed content formats, updating Joomla core and extensions, optimizing JavaScript and CSS files, and employing the latest version of Joomla, including many more. Let’s discuss each of these techniques one by one.
1. Run the Latest Version
Updating the Joomla version is the first thing you must do when your website is slowing down. The latest version usually contains fixes such as code improvements, template extensions, and speed enhancements. These fixes are essential to run your website operations more effectively. Therefore, always make sure that you are using the latest Joomla version and that your Joomla extensions are up to date.
You can upgrade your Joomla website by clicking on the "Update now!" notification, or you can manually update by navigating to "Components” to "Joomla! Update." Similarly, you can update your Joomla extensions by navigating to "Extensions" to “Manage" to "Update."
2. Implement Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Implementing a content delivery network (CDN) with Joomla is a popular way to speed up your website to get optimized performance. CDN integration into your Joomla site content, particularly images, JavaScript, and CSS, is loading instantly around the globe.
You can add a free CDN to your site or get a pro version, depending on your business requirements. Integrating CND into the latest version of Joomla can handle your traffic more efficiently and supports HTTP/2 for even faster content delivery.
3. Enable Joomla Caching Tools
Like WordPress, Joomla also offers its users some powerful default caching tools that you can enable to enhance your website’s speed and optimize its performance to the next level. Cashe makes sure that your website loads your content fully without missing any parts by serving pre-generated content to your visitors. The server does not have to look up all information requested in a database whenever a page is requested.
You need to follow two steps to enable your Joomla cache. Go to your settings and navigate “System" to "Global Configuration”. Click on the catching option and save the changes. You can also enable the Joomla system cache plugin for caching purposes. Navigate from "Extensions" to "Plugins" to the "System - Page Cache" plugin, which will allow it, and save the changes
4. Image Optimization
On average, almost 60% of a website's content is image-based. When you take more loading time, your website images must be compressed. By optimizing your website images, you can drastically decrease your page load time and speed up your Joomla site. This makes intelligent image compression the key to your website’s optimized performance.
You can also integrate KeyCDN's Optimus image optimizer into your Joomla site or use image compression online tools like PhotoShop to compress or resize your product images. Moreover, you can add Joomla extensions like Imgen, ImageRecycle image optimizer, Prizm Image, or XT Adaptive Images to deliver responsive images.
5. Optimize CSS and JavaScript
Optimizing CSS and JavaScript files is essential to improve your Joomla site’s loading speed and overall performance. JavaScript and CSS optimization will decrease download times as your browser doesn't have to fetch as many files, and it reduces the total number of HTTP requests being made.
To improve content loading, you can also try minification, stripping out whitespace, line breaks, etc.. To this end, you can use third-party extensions such as JCH Optimize, jbetolo, ScriptMerge, and JCC - JS CSS Control.
6. Clean up Your Joomla Database
Cleaning up your Joomla database is essential when it creates issues in your Joomla site’s loading speed. Unlike WordPress, the Joomla system does not have database cleaning-up default options. However, you can easily do it via phpMyAdmin by clicking the "Repair table" or "Optimize table” options.
7. Enable Browser Caching
You can also speed up your Joomla website by enabling browser caching. When you enable browser caching, users can grab the pre-generated data copy from your browser's cache. Navigate from "Extensions" to "Plugins," click on the "System—Page Cache" plugin, and save the changes by enabling the "Use Browser Caching” option.
Conclusion
Website optimization is vital to online business success. Speed optimization is crucial to improving your Joomla website’s overall performance. In today’s fast-paced age of digital marketing, no online business can run its marketing campaign or increase its sales without speeding up its e-commerce site. In this article, I have shared 7 essential techniques to speed up your Joomla websites. By following these techniques, you can improve your Joomla site's overall performance and skyrocket your sales.