#51 - Make Joomla load faster

One of the most annoying things that a user can encounter, is a slow loading website. A slow loading website will quickly turn off your users, something which you obviously want to avoid, especially if you are aspiring to returning users. There are many things you can do to make sure your website loads fast, and here we will highlight a few of them.

We'll start from the simple things first ... and continue with the more complicated ones ... 

• Get yourself a good host  - going for the cheapest host is the one thing you want to avoid. Let's say you go for the cheap host, with the assumption that you will shift to a good host when your site starts making money. Then you write an excellent article / post or anything. People like the article, and it gets Dugg! The more people see it, the more it gets Dugg, and as soon as you know it, your article makes the Digg! frontpage, bringing along massive amounts of traffic in a very short time. And then ... your cheap hosting buckles under the pressure. So you've gotten a chance at the slice of the golden pie, and it gets denied to you because you went for a cheap host. So, make a good investment, and get a good host ... NOW!
• Install / enable only the components / modules which are critical to your site - each component you install decreases the performance of your site, because each is adding additional queries, and execution time to your site. So keep extra stuff down to the barest minimum.
• Use a small sized template - when you have a complicated template, with lots of images, flash content and fancy stuff, you are putting additional stress on your server on each new visit you get. If you are looking for a heavy traffic site, you should keep the overall size of your template small. Small doesn't necessarily mean plain ... just think it out carefully, and design or buy your template accordingly...
• Enable caching on your site - Both Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5 support caching in their core. Turn it on ... it will increase your sites performance by putting less stress on your database
• Install Caching components - now this may go against point 2, however we think we can make an exception in this case. Page Cache from JoomlaPerformance.com decreases the page loads times of your Joomla pages dramatically and is highly recommended for heavy traffic Joomla sites! Its free aswell :)

With these steps, you should see a massive improvement in the loading times of your pages. If you have any other tips, please do add them in the comments below!