The speed and performance of your Joomla! web site is one thing that can help you get better search engine ranking for your web site. Speed is not only important for your visitors, but is also a key factor for your Google rankings.
If you look at your Google webmaster warnings, there might be some warnings related to the speed of your web site. Google will tell you if your site was unreachable, gave a timeout, or a certain page had a very high loading time.
We will be looking at the following things that can help you improve the performance of your site:
- Finding your slowdowns
- Using the cache function of Joomla!
- Looking for errors in log files
- How to improve your images
Before you do anything to speed up your web site, the first thing you need to check is, how well it performs. If you don't do that, you won't have a baseline to see how the improvements you make are affecting the loading time of your site. With this baseline you can check if the change is really an improvement, or if it is slowing down your web site. So, let's start getting that baseline.
Using the OctaGate service, you can perform the first check of your site ( http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/). Once you get there, just fill in the link of your web site.
After you hit the Start button, you have to wait for a few seconds until the page is completely loaded. After the check is done, you get a full view of what is using up your download time.
In the following screenshot we can see what each color code represents:
Let's look at the meaning of each color code:
- The first block shows when the element in that line is called
- The second block indicates the time between the first connection and the time when the first byte of that item is received
- The last block indicates the time elapsed before receiving the last byte of that item
To get a better understanding, if the second block is long, it takes more time for the server to respond to get the item. If your third block is long, it is probably a large image that takes time to be downloaded. As you can see in the previous figure, sometimes a third-party resource could slow down the loading of your site. In this case StatCounter takes some time to connect and get the scripts from their servers. But as it is not a significant slowdown and the service is great, I will leave it up there.
What you also see in the picture are two empty lines:
- There is no
favicon.icoin the root of the site - One of the images in the template images directory is missing
You might think that if there is no line, there is no problem. But there is a problem as both items are called either by a browser (favicon.ico) or by the template that is installed. So, once called, your browser stops for some time to wait for that item to arrive. For me, the total loading time of the template of this web site made me rethink whether I should use this specific template.
If you find that the loading time for your template is long, you should think about changing that template as well. In any case, you should fix the problems you find. We talked about templates in the previous chapter, and I will show you how to get a great favicon.ico file later in this chapter.
One of the tools you really need if you get into Search Engine Optimization is Firefox. In Firefox you should have already installed the Web developer plugin from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60. Now, you need to install YSlow from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369. The first plugin is for analyzing all the on page source elements and outlines. You will use the second one to analyze the page from a loading point of view. To get this plugin to work, you need to install the Firebug plugin from http://getfirebug.com/. Just install the plugin to Firefox and you will see a small icon on the status bar of your browser.
Now go to the page you want to analyze and hit that button. Here is the grade report of the previous page, which is the home page of my example web site:
Yes, your web site gets a grade. In my case a D, which is of course not good enough. But this tool also shows which elements of the page are pulling you down by grading them with an F. For each of these F grade items you will get an advice to improve that factor. Some of them will take a few tweaks only, while others may take a significant amount of time to fix. In either case, you have to make a simple decision: How much time will it take and what will the speed advantage be?
If it is a simple fix, go ahead and make that change. If it takes more time and knowledge to fix it, get some insight into the problem and a possible fix. Don't spend too much time getting an A. You are not going to get it as you are using StatCounter or Google Analytics. I prefer using both, but they are both out of your control and you need their service to know what is going on with your web site.
To show you how simple some fixes are, I installed and activated an optimized Joomla! template. In the following screenshot you can see the new grade:
On the OctaGate service page, the total time was reduced from six to four seconds, which is a 33.3 percent improvement in loading time. Go through all the items, read the explanation, and see if you can fix it fast. If you can't, get someone to do it for you or decide if it's worth the effort.
Look at the tools provided with YSlow. One of them gives you the possibility to get a printed report that you can use to get a smart and fast overview. The following image shows just a part of such a report:
Now as you know you have to improve some of the items that showed up in the reports. It is time to get into some of the basic stuff that you need to do in your configuration panel. Don't forget to reset the configuration.php file's security using your FTP program to read only (Mod 644) after the settings are activated and tested.