It is almost enthralling, owning a powerful and feature rich Joomla website and playing around with its multi faceted attributes and features to leverage from the online world. However, if you have witnessed a bump on the road, and you find your website not performing as nice as it is supposed to, you may want to check its performance.
Below we have discussed 4 amazing tips for you to enhance and keep a tab on the performance of your Joomla website. Please read ahead to discover the same:
Tip 1 – About time you bid adieus to unused extensions and plugins
To begin with, let us just take a moment and refine and remove the clutter which has made its way in our simple, beautiful and enchanting Joomla sites over the year. No matter how many other features we may suggest, until and unless you get this step right, the website will always fail on the performance front.
The reason why we are concentrating so much on this step is because first of all, you owe this to your website – to keep it clean and away from anything redundant, obsolete or irrelevant and useless in any one way or the other. And secondly, for the simple reason that a well-organized website performs wonderfully well on all of the web browsers.
And now, if you are concerned of removing the applications and extensions etc which you don’t think you would use anytime soon anyway, you can simply create a backup of the existing system and then remove all that you don’t require. And how much difficult is it to take the plunge anyway, once you know the way back home?
While the first time or light weight users should concentrate on removing third-party extensions, the seasoned developers should concentrate on un-publishing core plugins of Joomla.
Tip 2 – Bring home an Uptime monitor
One of the basic requirements of a good performance enhancement campaign is a robust response time baseline, and the best man for the job is an uptime monitor. An uptime monitor provides an enriched wealth of information regarding the performance of the website, it notifies you when the website is down and depending upon which monitor you have, you get various other privileged information about the performance of your website as well.
The prime attribute of an uptime monitor is to bridge the gap between analytics of the website and its performance. A good uptime monitor to use would Pndom; now it may cost you a bit, but various features such as sign up options, free management of a single website, real-time notifications, graphs and a lot more.
Tip 3 – Explore the benefits of a CDN Connection
A host of performance related issues can be solved with the right CDN connection in place. A CDN connection fundamentally provides a different source for the web browsers to download the files on the website. You may contact your website hosting services provider to activate the CDN. For a website which receives a lot of views on a daily basis and is only poised to grow in the future, a CDN connection makes the most sense.
Tip 4 – Ensure you have switched to Caching
Not all of us understand Caching exactly, and often develop a lot of notions around it. Caching is simply storing the last displayed web page. Each time a user clicks on the website, the site is then expected to retrieve the entire information regarding database and PHP, and subsequently showcase the same in HTML. The process is repeated each time a new user clicks on the website. But with caching in place, Joomla does create the page for the first viewer, but subsequently saves it and hence readily makes it available for the visitors who follow. You may simply switch on the Caching option from the backend of your Joomla website, or download extensions for the same. Although caching improves the performance of the website, it may get a bit tenacious if you have various interactive features on the website, and you may want to hire the services of professional Joomla Development Company to supervise and enhance the performance of the site, or perhaps develop the same from the scratch.
An End Note
Before you go ahead with the optimization task, ask yourself whether you are comfortable with doing all the technical stuff yourself or not; because if you are not comfortable, then contacting an expert Joomla Programmer would not be that bad an idea. A lot of enterprises and self-employed people hire Joomla Programmers to take care of any development or enhancement work that may arise with this particular system.
And now, please let us know whether you tried these steps and if you found these tips & tricks useful, in the comments section below.