Details: Created: 20 April 2015; Last Updated: 17 October 2015

Boost your site performance

To make your site loading as fast as possible, there are a lot of parameters coming into play. The four major parts I've identified are

Provider: your hosting provider and the hosting server you pay for
Server: the server configuration parameters
Content optimization: make sure you have optimized all content you provide (images, videos, downloads, ...)
Joomla CMS optimization: you can optimize the way your content is delivered by using the right plugins in the right way

Performance checks

A nice article with a lot of good tips I found on the Joomla site itself was http://magazine.joomla.org/issues/issue-july-2013/item/1361-how-i-got-my-website-to-load-in-1-29-seconds

In order to check your performance, there are a lot of free (completely free, so you can use them without any registration or having to give your email address!) online tools available. Every tool however has its own set of parameters it looks at, but if you combine a couple of them you can get a quite complete view of your sites performance.

PageSpeed from Google - a direct indication of your performance for Google, directly related to your Google ranking
YSlow from Yahoo - a direct indication of your performance for Yahoo, and as you can already guess directly related to your Yahoo ranking
GTMetrix - I love this tool because it combines the tests of PageSpeed and YSlow
WebPageTest.org - they check a lot of parameters which you maybe won't tune, but it gives you a thorough overview of all your site parameters
WebsiteOptimization.com
Pingdom.com - this is a free part of the website just to get an overview of their analysis

Performance hacks

From the analysis of these combined tools, I derived a couple of parameters you need to tune to ensure maximum speed and minimal bandwidth when running your website. This is not only impacting your site speed, but because of the parameters taken into account by the search engines, it will also impact your ranking in the search results. Let's get a deeper dive in the parameters.

Server Configuration Parameters
Content Optimization
YSlow - cookie free domain
Joomla Plugins (will be provided shortly)

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