Squeeze Maximum Performance From Your Joomla! Website

Tenko NikolovCEO at SiteGround

Before we start – who am I

• 17+ years of IT life• 8 years with SiteGround• 7 years CEO at SiteGround• Husband, dad• Passionate about photography and geeky toys• Addicted to cars and everything fast

Speaking of cars…This is my favorite driving machine! Why?

SPEED & PERFORMANCE

PERFORMANCE = OPTIMIZATIONS

Why optimize?

• Your speed affects your Google rankings!• Stay up under heavy load• Save $$$ from servers, Save the Planet too!• When your site is fast, you look professional• Keep readers/customers happy & paying

Let’s get the basics done

• Keep Joomla! up to date• Choose extensions wisely• Deactivate unused extensions, update used

Don’t mind some cache?

• Use Joomla Cache in Global Configuration– Setup Cache Properly – eg. Time to Live

• Some very good tutorials on Joomla Cache

http://www.theartofjoomla.com/joomla-caching-explained.html

Building your own templates?

• Simplify your templates as much as possible• Keep in mind HTTP requests are expensive

• Minify and combine CSS and JS files• Enable GZIP compression

Optimize your images

• Offload when possible– serve images from a CDN or Flickr

• Never let the browser do your job! Resize images for the web before uploading them!

• Smush your images -> smush.it• Use image sprites when possible

Check how’s your website doing?

Check your template’s performance:

»Google PageSpeed Insightshttps://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

»YSlowhttps://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Joomla has you covered!

• If you don’t know how to do it or are just lazy - Explore the JED!

• You can use extensions to boost your website performance!

Some highly rated extensions from the JED

• JCH Optimize – Combines JS and CSS, Combines images in Sprites, Minify and Gzip

• Jbetolo – same as above but w/ CDN support• JotCache – further improves the functionality

of the Joomla Built in Core Cache• Cache Cleaner – allows for easier cache

cleaning within the Joomla Admin panel

The advanced stuff

• Most of these require SSH access/dedicated environment/, and would require a skilled sysadmin to do.

• Should be done by your host, should you use a managed service.

Software tweaks

• Install RAM caching mechanismsMemcache and APC/Eaccellerator

• Install reverse proxyNginX or Varnish

• Choose your hosting platform wisely• Use staging environment to benchmark

More software tweaks

• Use fast & secure PHP like FastCGI• Move PHP binaries into RAM• Move MySQL to a different hard drive. Use RAID

& SSD for lightning fast performance.• Keep log files separate and small in size• Move TMP to RAM

Use CDN!

• CDN will help avoid unneeded I/O on your HDDs• CDN will make your website faster• CDN will appeal to both Google and your users

Easy to setup FREE CDN Providers CloudFlare www.cloudflare.comInCapsula www.incapsula.com

Hardware matters!

• Invest in hardware

Test at least 3 different hardware setups before proceeding.

Always benchmark performance and reliability

Add more RAM and Flash based disks and use them on maximum capacity for caching and databases

The big question: which hosting platform provides max performance?

DEDICATED VPS

SHARED

CLOUD

The common understanding

The picture CAN be different!

Let’s prove this

But what if we add server cache?

Some key takes

• Shared can be a good platform contrary to the common belief, but not always the right one

• If you need custom setup/deep customizations & have a big website -> go for VPS/dedicated

• Dedicated/VPS & Cloud can perform much better for you if you KNOW how to tweak them

More key takes

• Your site will perform better, regardless of the platform should it’s optimized.

• There are tools that can help you speed up your website, like extensions, CDNs and site loading speed checkers.

Some useful tools:

• Yslow• Google page speed• Chrome speed tracer• Webpagetest.org

It’s your turn!

Questions time!

THANK YOU!

Tenko Nikolov

SiteGround.com

Email: tenko@siteground.com

Twitter: @tnikolov