Make Your Joomla websites run faster
Any Joomla website can be made to run faster, or at least give your visitor that experience.
There are two features in Joomla that can speed up, or slow down your site.
Joomla cache!
First there is one feature in the Joomla Configuration Panel that is often overlooked and not used.
This feature is the cache mechanism that Joomla uses.
What is Cache?
Caching means that the pages that are generated by the server are stored in the cache folder.
When the page is called again, even by somebody else, the page is retrieved form this folder, without having to go to the making of the page again.
So this will provide a much faster loading of the page.
An other benefit of this is that your server load goes done, because the pages are already generated.
So what is the drawback? You need space on the server to do this.
Now it doesn't not take much space, but if you are already on your limit, don't use it.
Otherwise, test and see how much it takes, I think you will leave it on!
How to enable cache and what values to use.
The cache is enabled it the back-end configuration panel.
Just look for the cache Tab and set it to "enabled".
The time is given in seconds, standard this is 900 which corresponds to 15 minutes.
I personally think this is to limited for a standard website, for a news site its fine.
On Most of my sites I use 12 Hours, which is 43200 Seconds.
For a site that is not updated so much you can even set it to 24 hours that is 86400 second.
Enable the Module Cache
If you have the cache enabled you have turn on caching on the modules.
Go to the Modules section and then look at the published modules check if they have a caching ability and active it if they have, especially the Menu's.
Joomla Statistics
The statistics Joomla provides are very basic, but still they can slow down the loading of the pages, most certainly the first page somebody loads.
Mostly you provider will give you the opportunity to use the log files for you analyses, and this brings even more information that you need to analyse your website.
What information do you loose?
Well that is that you don't see what people what browsers they use, which Operating System and from what domains.
Also there are no statistics on the articles, but than again you probably don't have this set because it generates a lot of data.
If you need to see what people are searching for on your site, you can set this to on.
The standard setting is just for browser,OS and Domain.
So if You really need this information, leave it on.
