If there is any non-core section of your Joomla website that is critical to its performance, it must be the template. Your Joomla template is loaded on every single page that is served to your visitors, which means that any performance issue on your template will negatively affect your visitors’ experience on your website. Here are 5 tips that will help you enhance its performance:
- Remove module positions that you’re not using: For every module position that you have on your Joomla website, there’s a query (and subqueries) that tries to get all the modules from the database for that particular position. If there are no matching modules, the query will still run anyway. Removing these unnecessary positions will ensure that no queries are run needlessly.
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Use a different template for pages with completely different layout: Do not try to swamp your template with if conditions to make it adjust to all layouts. If a layout is substantially different than your main template, then go ahead, create a different template for that layout and assign that new template to all the pages that fall under this new layout.
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Try to move the content of static modules that are assigned to all pages to your template: OK, we know, this tip might be considered as “bad practice”, but let us explain: As we stated above, any module inclusion represents a database overhead. If, you have a module that is included on every single page and always has the same content (and, of course, always assigned to the same position), then it’s better to move it to your template, you will save unnecessary hits to the database and your website will be slightly faster (noticeably faster if that module does a lot of calculations). Note that this strategy works very well on large Joomla websites.
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Ensure your template has valid HTML: A page with valid HTML not only is lighter on the browser, it is also a healthy sign for search engines. Now a template with valid HTML does not necessarily mean that your website’s HTML is valid (because your content’s HTML might not be valid), but it is a good first step and it is necessary towards having a website that is fully W3C compliant.
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Remove comments and unnecessary code from your template: While comments and unnecessary code are not that very expensive when it comes to performance, they do have a cost, and that cost is “incurred” on every page. Removing those comments and unnecessary code has a slight positive performance on the Joomla website and it’s very simple to do!
We hope that you found these 5 tips helpful. If you need help implementing them, then please contact us and we can do the work for you. Our fees are reasonable, our work is ultra-fast and professional, and we are extremely friendly!