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Speed up Joomla

Written by Travis Nuske

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Speed up Joomla

Generally Joomla sites are not well optimized for fast load times. The main performance increases can be made by:

Making fewer HTTP requests
Add Expires headers
Put JavaScript at bottom
Configure entity tags (ETags)
Compress components with gzip
Enable Joomla Cache

You can speed up your page loading times in Joomla by using the following tips:

Joomla Enable GZip Compression

By enabling GZIP compression, you can reduce the number of HTTP requests, remove white space from your code and reduce the file size of the page elements. There are two things you have to do to fully enable gzip compression in Joomla:

Download & install the RokGzipper plug-in from here: http://www.rockettheme.com/extensions-downloads/club/1009-rokgzipper

This plug-in will combine and gzip your js and css files, reducing the amount of http requests, and reducing the size of the requested files.

Enabling the GZIP compression in the administration page will allow gzipping of the html elements. To do this, log into the administration page.

Click Site -> Global Configuration. Click the Server page. Choose GZIP Page Compression: Yes

Update to the latest version

Updating to the latest Joomla version can improve performace. The latest version of Joomla 1.5 at time of writing is 1.5.23. This can be downloaded from here: http://www.joomla.org/download.html

Joomla Enable Cache

Joomla builds each page on-the-fly by making many database queries and file accesses. For sites that do not change very often, you can enable the Caching system so pages are temporarily stored on the sever as complete pages, without needed to be re-created every time the page is requested. To enable the Joomla Cache:

Click Site -> Global Configuration. Click the Server page. In the Cache Settings section choose:

Cache: Yes
Cache Time: 1440 minutes (this is 1 day - choose a cache time that is appropriate for how often your site is updated.) You can manually purge the cache if you need to see changes appear on your site immediately. To purge the cache: Choose Tools -> Clean Cache.

Click Extensions -> Plugin Manager. Click the system - cache plugin and enable it. I also set the cache lifetime to 1400 seconds (one day).

Joomla Add Expire Headers

Joomla does not automatically add expire headers, so the browser has trouble working out if it should cache the pages or not. Enabling Expire Headers allows the browser to better cache the pages.

Download and install the plug-in from here: http://www.richeyweb.com/development/joomla-plugins/66-expires-headers

Leave the default options in the plug-in and then enable it. This plug-in adds headers for pages, but cannot add them for images, javascript or css files.

To overcome this, add the following file code block to the .htaccess file in the root of your joomla installation:

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Expires "Wed, 15 Apr 2020 20:00:00 GMT"
Header set Cache-Control "public"
</FilesMatch>

Joomla Remove ETags

ETags allow the browser to properly use it's local cache, if incorrectly set, the browser may not use the cache and re-request files. To overcome this, add the following code block to your .htaccess file: