Sites You Can See - Website Loading Time
How to Make Your Joomla Site Load Faster
Speed is one of the most important factors for the success of your website and a way for your site to stand out among others. Slow loading websites result in high bounce rates. If your website takes longer than 2 seconds to load, visitors are more likely to navigate away from your site, and therefore at risk for low conversion rates. To get more visitors to stay on your site, you must address the issue of loading speed. Below are tips and suggestions for you to take to increase your loading speed.
Steps to take for a faster loading website:
General Analysis
For the first step to decreasing your loading time you have to start at the basics. Are there any issues that jump out at you just by looking at the site? What pages load slower? Do those pages have large images or videos? Below are some things you should look for:
Large Pictures
Does your site have large pictures in the content or the background image? This could be contributing to a slower load time.
Videos
Loading time will be affected if your website has many videos or movies that are lengthy.
Web-host
The web-hosting company you choose for your site can have a huge impact on your site speed. Even if you have done all of the steps to increase your loading speed, a bad hosting company can be the cause of a slow site. Do your research before choosing a hosting company.
Clean Up the Site's Back-End
The next phase of decreasing your loading time is to go into the back end of your site and do some Spring cleaning. If the back-end is cluttered with extensions and files that are unused, your site's loading speed will suffer. Below are a few key items you should consider when cleaning up the back end of your site:
Get rid of extensions you are not using
A great thing about Joomla! is all of the extensions that can be added on that offer so many capabilities for your website. But, pick your extensions wisely. Each plugin, module, or extension adds their own CSS and Javascript to the mix, adding to heavier load times. If you need all the extensions you have already picked, think about whether you actually need all those bells and whistles on your home-page. You can move them to another page so that your home page loading time will not be affected.
Less Requests From Server
If your server has too many files, your load time will be much slower. Every image, CSS file, JavaScript file, font file, and other associated file that the webpage has to pull from the server is a request. So, shedding some of those files will help your website load faster.
Maintenance
Regular maintenance is important to having a successful website. Keeping your extensions up to date and making sure everything is running smoothly will help your website load faster. Below are key items to consider when performing maintenance on your site:
Update Extensions
Make sure you have the latest version of Joomla and the other extensions on your site. Having the most recent version of Joomla is important for your site speed because there are multiple code improvements in each new version. CreativeSights updates all of this for you when you opt for our monthly maintenance program. Having the latest version of Joomla is important for your site speed because in each version there are multiple code improvements.
Enable Cache
Cache is a way of serving content that is already stored and presented to your website visitors, instead of the server accessing all the information each time a page is requested. Just make sure to clear your cache when you change your content!
Enable Compression
In the Joomla Global Configuration, there is a tool called G-zip that you can activate. With G-zip turned on, your pages are compressed in a zip-file, sent to the browser on your PC, and unpacked there.
CreativeSights offers a Monthly Maintenance Plan that addresses some of the key issues in this article. With this plan, we make sure Joomla! and other extensions are updated, take care of the back-end issues, and identify the reasons why your site may be loading slowly. Contact us today to learn more bout our Monthly Maintenance Plan.