What is the current pagespeed result? Is it complaining of anything?

If you allow me to jump in board of this discussion, im suffering from the same problem and i think most joomla users are. my yslow indicates 62 grade which is almost the same grade it gives this forum page on stackidea but your website loads in two second while mine in 19 ... any idea why .. I'm on vps?

i also have JCH as Randall but still can't seem to speed up the website. i use easyblog and easydiscuss, jomsocial and komento at this moment. DNS added no big difference ..

Not sure what joomla users should be doing in this case.

Muhanad,

I used the Google PageSpeed site and followed some of the tips to speed things up. I am not finished yet, but can suggest:

1. If you are using images or header images on your main Home page, then try to reduce the size of the image down.

I was able to reduce two images from 30k each to to 8.5k each, which speed up the Home page load significantly.

By following the suggestions, you can speed certain areas up.

Delete all unecceassry plugins and components and modules you are not using on your site.
Delete all articles not being used.

I'll post more here later when I get to my laptop later today.

Plus one to using as few of extensions as possible but of course using the ones you need. This is another reason I liked ES because it has much of what I want centralized into one extension. I did notice that ES uses 70 database tables which I've never seen any other extension do that. But then again I'm sure they have their reasons for this.

Thanks Randal,

I already did optimize the images, deleted unused extensions, tried cdn, jch plugin, tried to combine some stuff , turned cache one but yet what amazes me that some websites has the same score as mine but loads much much faster

Muhamad,

I forgot to mention this optimization. Akeeba Admin Tools. - run the free version to optimize your site database tables. This was the one thing that really helped to speed my site up from a score of 32/100 to 64/100.

Maintain
Optimise your database tables. Clean your temporary directory. Or perform any of the countless other daily maintenance tasks with a single click each.

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/site-security/site-protection/14087

Randall

Sent from my iPad

oh thanks randall,

i have the paid version of akeeba admin tools but never used this option. thanks

muhanad wrote:

oh thanks randall,

i have the paid version of akeeba admin tools but never used this option. thanks

Let me know how it goes.

Hey guys,

There's many factors to speed but one of the key things that we did was to install the pagespeed module for Apache. It seems to help us compress images / css / javascript files and solves a whole lot of load issues.

There's quite a number of reasons why page speed is reporting a lower score for your web pages. One of it is most likely because there are external scripts on your site. For instance, if you have Facebook connect, it needs to render the javascript block from Facebook and Pagespeed seems to penalize on this one (Not sure if there are any work around).

Josh,

I don't think we have 70 database tables but we do have more tables than normal extensions but this is simply because we try to lower the load by running more queries versus lesser queries (but bigger queries which often lead to a slow log). There's quite a bit of confusions by people that running a lot of queries causes the site to slow down but this is absolutely wrong. Running multiple smaller queries is much faster than running a single query that uses tons of join statements. (We have experienced this in EasyDiscuss and we have learnt from our lessons).

My bad, 73 database tables now. (I counted twice to confirm this) But in all seriousness I'm pleased to hear there is a good reason for this. I believe you after taking a database class and SQL class on how they use more tables to create efficiencies. The lesson you learned from EasyDicuss sounds like a good learning lesson that I'm glad was taken seriously. So from my stand point I'm comfortable with the number of tables considering that I have a bit of evidence to support your claim.

Thanks for understanding Josh By the way, having more tables also doesn't mean that it is heavy

Right. I had this misconception when I first started getting into the database world. Same for number of php files.

No problem Josh

This is a good article to read to learn more about optimizing your Joomla site:

How I got my website to load in 1.29seconds - By the Founder of dart-creations.com/

SUMMARY
We've been hearing for a while that SEO may be affected by the time your page takes to load - so recently we've started an intensive exercise of getting our website to load in the absolute minimal time possible. Our belief is that the current load speed and rating in GTMetrix is relatively good 85% for PageSpeed, and 95% for YSlow Grade and a load time of 1.29seconds, so we thought we'd share how we did this. Some of these are Joomla! specific, but the general concepts apply to ANY content management system and any website.

http://www.dart-creations.com/joomla/joomla-tutorials/how-i-got-my-website-to-load-in-129seconds.html

Hello Randall,

Thanks for sharing this! It is indeed a good read

Cheers!

Mark,

I have installed pagespeed module and in fact it helped me getting my yslow score up 5-6 points.


It would great if you can share more info how did you manage to make stackideas load in 2-4 seconds .. my question is what server do you use for stackideas website .. is it a vps or dedicated .. and are there any big difference in speed between the two ?


Regards,

Another plugin I highly suggest for speeding up pages is JCH Optimize. This plugin combines your external JavaScript and CSS files into one to minimize expensive http requests.

Hello - I hope you all don't mind me jumping in but...and thanks to all for your tips!

I use the following methodology to figure out how to become a bolt of lightning:

Page Speed Metrics:
http://gtmetrix.com/

From the information I receive from them I edit various files based on their recommendations.

Components:

I use JotCache component to handle caching issues.
Akeeba Admin Tools to handle web site/DB maintenance

I added some lines in my .htaccess file:

# Use PHP 5.3

AddType application/x-httpd-php53 .php

# Added Expires Headers 12222013
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
# Enable expirations
ExpiresActive On
# Default directive
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
# My favicon
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
# Images
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
# CSS
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
# Javascript
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"
</IfModule>

# Added gzip compression 12222013
# compress text, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and XML
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

# remove browser bugs
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent

It appears my making these changes I have sped the site up a bit. It scores pagespeed 84 and yslow 73 and I am improving it further. Hope this is helpful.

Regards,
Rob

Thanks for sharing this Rob