Joomla is highly criticized of being slow. We can say, with confidence, that this criticism has grounds. Joomla is indeed slow. This is because Joomla is a very complex CMS and there’s a lot of code that is executed in order to display even the “about us” page of a website.
So, what can you do make your Joomla website faster? Just follow the below tips, and you will notice a positive and significant change in performance:
- Use caching: Joomla allows you to cache your pages. Note that we’re not talking about caching the content of your pages, we’re talking about caching the PHP code that is to be executed. This is because before Joomla attempts to display a page, Joomla creates a PHP file that contains all the code to be executed in order to display a page. If you use caching, the overhead of creating that PHP file is eliminated. However, you should pay attention that when you use caching, some of your changes won’t appear unless you delete your cache.
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Disable unused extensions: If there’s an extension (especially a plugin) that you’re not using, disable it. Extensions can dramatically slow down the speed of your Joomla website, and you don’t want extensions that you’re not even using anywhere on your website to slow down your website.
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Check your extensions: Here’s how to check your extensions. Just disable them all, and then enable them one by one, benchmarking your website every time you enable another one. See by how much the speed loading has increased. And, if you see an extension that noticeably increased the loading time of the page, then you should optimize it. But how do you do this? There a couple of ways: 1) optimize the database structure used by the extension (such as indexing tables, optimizing queries, etc…), 2) optimize the PHP code of the extension. If you’re not a developer, then you need to have a developer do both for you (Note: We will gladly do this for your, just contact us!).
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Optimize the Joomla core code: This is a last resort, and should only be used if, and only if, your Joomla website has a lot of pages and/or receives a lot of visitors. This is a very delicate task and it’s important that you seek professional assistance in order to do this. Note that once you optimize the Joomla core code, it will become very hard to upgrade to a new version of Joomla.
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