1. HOW TO SPEED UP YOUR
JOOMLA SITE?
Daniel Kanchev
Performance Guru

2. Before We Begin – Who’s That Guy Daniel?
✓ 7+ years of Joomla! experience
✓ 5 years with SiteGround
✓ Love travelling the world
✓ Addicted to extreme sports

3. ✓ Site speed affects your Google Rankings!
✓ Keep readers/customers happy & paying
✓ Be able to handle more visitors
✓ Go green and save $$$ from servers
WHY BOTHER DOING IT?

4. Faster Joomla = Optimizations
!
!
KEEP
CALMIT’S NOT
ROCKET
SCIENCE

5. ✓ Keep your Joomla! updated
✓ Choose extensions wisely
✓ Deactivate unused extensions, upgrade used
✓ Simplify your templates as much as possible
GENERAL GUIDELINES

6. Simple Front Page Is Better
✓ Fancy stuff – only if you really need it
✓ Remove unnecessary large images
✓ Use fewer internal/external links – add sitemap
✓ Avoid loading content from remote servers

7. APPLICATION LEVEL OPTIMIZATIONS

8. Enable Compression
✓ Natively supported by Joomla! – no extensions needed
✓ Requires mod_gzip/deflate to be enabled on the server ***
Site
Global
Configuration
Server

9. Enable Joomla! Cache
✓ Enable the “System – Cache” plugin

10. Recommended Cache Settings
Site
Global
Configuration
System
Cache Settings

11. Some .htaccess Magic
✓ Get the code:
http://goo.gl/ze09B
✓ How it works:
- Etag – Tells browsers that an image/unit does not need to be reloaded
- Expires Headers – Set different expiration dates for various file types
- AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE – minifies the compiled HTML source code

12. Some .htaccess Magic
✓ The code:
FileETag MTime Size
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/javascript
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "now plus 1 hour"
ExpiresByType text/css "now plus 1 week“
ExpiresByType application/javascript "now plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "now plus 1 week”

13. More Optimizations: Images, CSS & JS
✓ Resize images – never upload 2560x1600 pictures
✓ Smush your images
✓ Minify and combine CSS and JS files
✓ Use image sprites

14. Sounds Nice, How Do I Begin?
✓ Use smush.it
✓ Photoshop/Fireworks
✓ Joomla! Extensions

15. Some Highly Rated Extensions
✓ JCH Optimize – Combines JS and CSS, Combines
images in sprites, Minify and Compress
✓ Jbetolo – same as above but + CDN support
✓ JotCache – improves the Joomla! built in Core
Cache
✓ Cache Cleaner – easily clean the cache from the
Joomla! admin panel

16. JCH Optimize
✓ Enable the “System – JCH Optimize” plugin

17. JCH Optimize Settings

18. Google mod_pagespeed
✓ An open-source Apache module - compress, combine and
cache
✓ Needs to be installed/configured by a System Administrator
✓ Available on SiteGround servers *

19. Check How’s Your Website Doing
✓ Google Page Speed Insights - http://goo.gl/zPkxx
✓ YSlow - http://goo.gl/qIios
✓ GTmetrix - http://gtmetrix.com/

20. Some Results – Default Joomla!
No
Optimizations
Cache/
Compression
.htaccess
rules
JCH
Page Load Time 1.61s 1.49s 1.32s 1.02s
Total Page Size 563KB 162KB 162KB 151KB
Number of Requests 35 35 35 19
Page Speed Grade F (41%) B (65%) B (87%) A (91%)
YSlow Grade C (70%) B (66%) B (86%) A (92%)

21. SERVER LEVEL OPTIMIZATIONS

22. Use CDN
!
YOUR VISITORS
LOCATION
MATTERS!

23. CDN Features
✓ CDN will make your website faster
✓ CDN will help avoid unneeded I/O on your hard drives
✓ CDN will appeal to both Google and your visitors

24. Software Tweaks
✓ Use fast and secure PHP like FastCGI
✓ Move PHP binaries to RAM
✓ Move TMP to RAM
✓ Move MySQL to a separate hard drive: RAID & SSD
✓ Enable MySQL query cache
✓ Use TMPFS for MySQL’s tmpdir

25. Opcode/Object Caching
✓ FastCGI + APC PHP extension
✓ Memcached and PHP/MySQL
✓ eAccelerator

26. Joomla Interaction with Your Database
✓ First request goes to the
database server

27. Object Caching
✓ First request goes to the
database server
✓ Objects are also stored
in Memcached

28. Object Caching
✓ All consecutive requests
are forwarded to the
Memcached server

29. How PHP works
! Scanning
! Lexing
! Parsing
! Compilation
! Opcode
! Execution

30. ! Opcode ! Execution
PHP Opcode Caching

31. Reverse Proxy Servers

32. Reverse Proxy Servers

33. Reverse Proxy Servers

34. Reverse Proxy Servers

35. ✓ Custom PHP/MySQL configuration
✓ Memcached/PHP APC
✓ Joomla! friendly reverse proxy setup
Our Own Solution: The SUPERCACHER

36. Final Results: Joomla + VirtueMart
No
Optimizations
Application Level
Optimizations
Server Level
Optimizations
Page Load Time 5.22s 3.49s 1.09s
Total Page Size 1.89MB 0.67MB 0.67MB
Number of Requests 76 28 28
Page Speed Grade F (41%) B (85%) A (92%)
YSlow Grade C (70%) B (84%) A (94%)

37. Some Key Takes
✓ Speed optimization is a process – do it regularly
✓ Always test!
✓ Choose a well optimized host

38. QUESTIONS
TIME
?

39. THANK YOU!
Daniel Kanchev
daniel.k@siteground.com