You’ve used the best Joomla templates and your content is amazing. But no matter how fantastic your site looks, the speed of the pages is one of the most critical components to the success of your site. Faster load times help to boost your search engine rankings.
Look at the figures: as many as 40% of people tend to abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds to lad. And every extra second the website takes loses you another 7% in conversion rates.
Get the Site up to Speed and Maximise Profits!
Minimizing Load Times:
Here are a few techniques you can implement with your best Joomla templates to minimise load times and maximise revenue.
For Starters:
One of the main keys to faster pages is reducing the front-end load time. As much as 80% of the response time for end-users is tied up in HTTP requests. So to minimise those requests, here’s what you have to do:
- Combination – take all the scripts and pile them into one single script. Also combine all CSS in one stylesheet
- Simplicity – make the page design as simple as possible. Some of the best Joomla templates will help with this.
- Use VPS or Dedicated Server for hosting since shared hosting does not create the fastest experience for users. You can also use discounts before signing up to most providers such as InterServer VPS Coupons.
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Combine CSS Sprites and Images:
If you have a lot of images on your website, multiple roundtrips to the server are being forced in order to get the resources secured. This is going to drastically slow down page speed. Why not combine all the background images and a page into one image?
Enabling Compression:
Compress resources using gzip or deflate. This will lower the number of bytes per page sent over a network. You will still need to optimise the content for compression and to make sure the web content is effectively compressed, you’ll need to:
- Create consistency across CSS and HTML coding.
- Be consistent with casing and make use of lowercase as much as you can.
- Make all your HTML tag attribute quotes consistent
- Minify CSS and JavaScript and get rid of unnecessary extra space and line breaks.
Leveraging Browsing Cache:
When someone visits your website, not matter how great your template, their browser will store loads of files like stylesheets, images and scripts. That means the number of HTTP requests are reduced and loading times will be quicker next time they visit.
However, that information has an expiry date, also known as expires headers. These expires headers tell a server how long to cache an item for.
Enable Response Headers:
HTTP requests are really simple – they grab and then send a file and then they close. Simple – but not particularly fast.
Make use of keepalive messages, which will tell the web browser and server to agree to use the same connection when grabbing and sending multiple files. So, the server will hold the connection open while someone is on your site as opposed to opening a new connection with each and every request. That means the network, memory and processor of the visitor doesn’t have to work too hard.
Unique Ways to Pass the Time On the InternetPerformance Testing Tools:
One of the most important things to do to make sure the speed of your site is up to scratch once you’ve chosen the best Joomla templates and that is to grab a couple of performance testing tools. Here are 3 that will help evaluate your site and offer recommendations for improvement.
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1. Pingdom Website Speed Test
Grab a free page test tool to test the speed of your website. The results returned will match real user experiences since real web browsers are used such as Chrome. Pingdom will the load speeds and then record performance data.
2. YSlow
This is a Yahoo tool that will complement your well-chosen web template. The tool grades your pages based on rules for high performance and gives you a summary of your page’s components.
3. Page Speed Insights
This is a great tool from Google, particularly if you’re a web developer. It will help to improve your site’s performance and is super user-friendly.
Conclusion
As websites get cooler and page speeds slow down, you need to choose the best Joomla templates to ensure your site is the one people continue to visit.
Sacrificing site speed for the newest add-ons isn’t worth the money you can lose due to latency issues.
