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Speeding Up Joomla

Joomla does a pretty good job at presenting web pages at a decent speed. I find it unfair when I read articles about why to use this CMS rather than Joomla, or other such negative commentaries regarding the speed of Joomla. To keep the arguement very short, Joomla can run quite fast when the proper environment is used regarding its operation. Personally, I have found 3 variables to be the key factors in determining Joomla loading speed.

  • Hosting
  • Template
  • Components / Modules

Hosting
As a normal part of the learning curve, shared hosting may be the plan for which a web site is hosted. In this case, shared resources can really affect performance. VPS or dedicated servers will allow you to have control and to monitor which processes eat up the CPU. Operating a VPS or dedicated server is more responsibility and requires knowledge regarding how to maintaining a Linux server, but well worth it if there comes a time when optimizing your server for performance is a top priority.

Template
Templates can be hand-crafted, purchased, or made with software. Hand-crafted templates will give the best performance….period. For example, I built a template with Artisteer, then, made the same hand-crafted design and the YSlow rating was 76% for Artisteer and 95% for the hand-crafted version. Hand-crafted templates can have many less lines of css and less images. When a custom template is used, the web developer needs to know where and how all modules, text, components and images will be positioned during template construction.

Components/Modules
Component and module usage will affect performance. In extreme cases, like Joomla statistics, large database queries can really slow a site down.

Conclusion
Joomla sites can rank quite high in terms of speed if the web developer makes adequate files and uses an adequate server.