Basic and advanced tips and tricks to optimize your Joomla website in order to achieve maximum performance - a presentation by Tenko Nikolov for JoomlaDay Chicago 2012.

1. Squeeze Maximum Performance
From Your Joomla! Website
Tenko Nikolov
CEO at SiteGround

2. 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

3. Speaking of cars…

4. PERFORMANCE = OPTIMIZATIONS

5. 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

6. Let’s get the basics done
• Keep Joomla! up to date
• Choose extensions wisely
• Deactivate unused extensions, update used

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. Check how’s your website doing?
Check your template’s performance:
»Google PageSpeed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
»YSlow
https://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

11. 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!

12. 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

13. 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.

14. Software tweaks
• Install RAM caching mechanisms
Memcache and APC/Eaccellerator
• Install reverse proxy
NginX or Varnish
• Choose your hosting platform wisely
• Use staging environment to benchmark

15. 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

16. 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.com
InCapsula www.incapsula.com

17. 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

18. The big question: which hosting platform
provides max performance?
SHARED
DEDICATED VPS
CLOUD

19. The common understanding

20. The picture CAN be different!

21. Let’s prove this

22. But what if we add server cache?

23. 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

24. 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.

25. Some useful tools:
• Yslow
• Google page speed
• Chrome speed tracer
• Webpagetest.org

26. It’s your turn!
Questions time!

27. THANK YOU!
Tenko Nikolov
SiteGround.com
Email: tenko@siteground.com
Twitter: @tnikolov