Harvard University- The Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (Gsas.harvard.edu), The Alliance for Catholic Education – University of Notre Dame (Ace.nd.edu), The Hill (Thehill.com), It Wire (Itwire.com), United Nations Regional Information Center for Western Europe UNRIC ( Unric.org), Linux.com. These websites sound familiar, though, they are not related in any way but have one thing in common i.e. they all have been developer using Joomla.
If you might have gone through these websites, then you must have experienced a good user interface the moment you landed on their page till you left. How is it possible to manage these sites? How can I make my site at par with them? If questions like these often cross your mind, then you’re at the right place. Through this article, I’m going to tell you about some innovative approaches for improving your Joomla website, whether you simply want to just enhance your site’s performance, speed, search engine ranking etc. you can do with ease after going through this article. But the prerequisite is that you need to have an insight of Joomla Development Services for making the process further easy.
You develop new business ideas to be at the peak and for that choosing the perfect platform to start the development with is an imperative step for stepping into the right direction.
Is your site well-optimized?
It’s quite simple to check whether your site is optimized or not. Optimized and performance are two terms that can be used interchangeably, therefore, if the loading time of your site is below normal, then it is not an optimized site. Check if all the extensions and plugins are functioning properly. You can manually check how your site is performing as well as there are some online tools for checking such parameters. Google’s PageSpeed insights is one such online tool for eradicating such issues.
You’ll have two results either your site is optimized or not. If your site is not optimized, then you must give it an urgent attention and if it is optimized, still you can look for ways to make it more optimized.
Joomla is another CMS tool used for developing dynamic websites that contain a large number of web pages in order to give flexibility to users who want regular updates related to products and services. You can create any type of website from static to dynamic or simple to complex depending on the business objectives. This Content Management System (CMS) provides you with exceptional web development services and innovative digital marketing solutions for taking your business to an advanced level. It provides you with the best business site experience and helps you to connect with global clients.
Joomla web development is popular and widely used because of its ease to use and even a layman can easily update the site easily. Building websites using Joomla will have various benefits like low-cost investment, live business, easily outreaching a maximum number of people.
Some other benefits:
- Web marketing and SEO friendly
- Easy navigation and designing
- Payment Gateway integration
- Reliable CMS
- Extension, Module and Component Development.
Steps for improving your Joomla website:
1. Always use the latest version:
Every now and then there are updates available for Joomla and it is recommended to always use the latest version as it’s always more advanced than the previous version and comes with all the issues being fixed such as speed enhancements, code improvements, clutter free etc and also ensure that all the extensions and plugins and modules are too, up to date.
To update the Joomla site simply click on “Update now” and then manually update by navigation to “components” -> “Joomla Update”.
Look for extension updates, if any. Simply click on “Extension -> “Manage” -> “ Update”.
2. Enable Joomla cache:
Every time a user visits your Joomla site, it fetches content from the database and loads extensions, plugins, modules required for that page, hence, making the process a little bit lengthy. This can be solved by Joomla caching system. Once caching has been enabled, it does away with the process of fetching data each time. The first time a page loads, the result from the process is stored and the user gets the stored value instead of repeating the whole process. However, there are two steps involved to enable Joomla cache.
3. Enable Joomla system cache plugin:
Simply click on “Extensions” -> “Plugin Manager” then look for system cache plugin and enable it.
4. Enable Cache setting in Global configuration:
Simply click on “System” -> “Global Configuration” then open the ‘System’ tab where you can find the ‘Cache Settings’, select the “Progressive caching” or “Conservative caching”
Progressive Caches the content for each unique visitor
Conservative Caching delivers the same cached content
5. Set up a sitemap:
A sitemap lists all the URLs of your site that search engine is able to index them. But, Joomla doesn’t have any built-in sitemap tool. You’ve to create either page view (collection of links) according to search engine’s specifications.
For both, smaller and large & dynamic sites, online sitemap generator is a good option. You can use any of the extension mentioned-below.
– JSiteMap (Basic/premium)
– Aimy Sitemap (Free)
– Qlue Sitemap (Free)
– OSMap (Free/premium)
But the thing to be noted is that refrain from using Xmap as it has security holes and sometimes these tools generate the sitemap in real-time based on the modifications and when you edit the contents it automatically reflects on the sitemap.
1. Content Delivery Network:
If you want to speed up your Joomla website, then implementing Content Management Network (CDN) is the ideal way of doing that. This ensures that you serve your Joomla products, JavaScript, images, CSS etc. from multiple locations so they get delivered faster to users. CDN is a system of distributed networks that deliver web pages and web content to different users based on different geographical locations, content delivery server and origin of the web page. The motive of CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.
2. Keep the site clean:
As the complexity of your site advances so does the functionality. You may use lots of extensions, plugins, modules that can slow down the speed of your site. Moreover, the more extensions you use the more HTTP requests you’ll need. Keep your site as light as possible for better performance.
3. Turn on GZip compression:
Web pages can be heavy and might slow down the site’s speed, therefore, send out your pages in a compressed format. You should compress all the CSS & HTML files before uploading on the server so that a much smaller packet of data is sent to the user and can be uncompressed by the browser. GZip is one of the popular compression methods and lets you compress the file without damaging the web content in any way reducing the response time.
All you need to do is just make a little change in the following code:
Click on Top Menu select system -> Global Configuration and click on Server (tab) -> GZIP Page compression and select the “YES” option and save the settings.
4. Optimize JavaScript and CSS files:
By optimizing JavaScript and CSS files you improve and enhance your front-end performance as the browser doesn’t have to fetch the files many times, thus, reducing the total number of HTTP requests. Although, Joomla doesn’t have this functionality, but there are third-party extensions that can be used to enable this feature. You can make your site optimized by eliminating issues where the database tables are located. Again, Joomla doesn’t have this functionality but you can easily do it through PhpMyAdmin.
If there are extensions or plugins that you don’t longer need, then I’d recommend you to delete or remove those table from the database enhancing the performance.
Author Bio:
Emily Smith is an ed-tech enthusiast and has been associated with CWS Technology as a writer for more than 7 Years. CWS is the leading IT solutions and services company offering its expertise in HTML to WordPress service, custom android app development, PSD to WordPress service and much more. Emily has a passion for writing on emerging technologies like application management outsourcing, consulting, system integration etc.
