How To Boost your Joomla site Loading Performance the easy way

How To Boost your Joomla site Loading Performance

I recently came across a post of Alledia about this new Joomla Cache Component.

And since I want you to have a really good performing website I checked it out for you.

It blew me away…

Point is that you can speed up your website by using the cache funtion of Joomla itself and thus gaining some speed in loading you pages.

This component is going to boost your performance (page loading time that is) not simple by 0ne or two percent… no you see loading times drop by double digits percentages!

But there are some things you need to know before installation:

The speed gain is for not-logged-in users, that means the visitors to your site, not the members!
Some Core files are hacked, but the installation makes backup files and there is an uninstall option
You get a text “Powered By Page_Cache by Ircmaxell” under the Footer of you site, but for just $10 dollar you can buy a license file that takes that away… or hack the component code yourself, which is also okay by the developer (You got to Love this Guy..)

Installing the component

Installation of the component is pretty easy, you just create or copy a few extra files and change permissions on them before installation.

First create these files or copy them from the originals and rename them

/index.bak.php

/administrator/index.bak.php

/administrator/index2.bak.php

/administrator/index3.bak.php

Then upload those to your root and administrator directory via FTP, or JoomlaXplorer.
Change the persmission on the originals and the just oploaded files to 707 (my favorite instead of 777)

Now you are ready to install, you can do that just like any normal component via your controlpanel.

Configuration of the Cache

Setting up the configuration after installation is also very easy.
Just open the Configuration of the component and set the options you want.

Just make sure you put in you cache directory and that it is writable, you can use the joomla standard and fill in “cache/”, don’t forget the trailing “/”.

Its up to you if you want to have the loading time shown as well below the “Powered by” field.

Leave the rest to the standard which will works fine for most of your websites.

The Real Benefits and the Extra Bonus

Af course you want to know about the results..
Well, my home page on www.pathos-seo.com went from a loading time of 1.2 seconds to 0.07 seconds from the cached version and I allready used the standard Joomla cache!

Which you should leave on for your members!!

But the best results was with one of my customers..
They are using the Virtuemart component with a productscoller on the Frontpage.
The products always took some time to load so the scroller part was not filled for about 1 to 2 seconds.. now it is up with the rest of the page in under 0.5 seconds.

One of the bigger issues was that if they update the site, that was also using the Joomla cache, they did not see the update results because the frequently forgot to clear the cache an then relaod the page…

The newly installed component clears the cache if you hit “save”… thus making the changes directly visible! No more mails and Phone calls about not seeing the updates..

Some other results that are reported on the Forum:
Mambohut reported 0ver 97% best decrease of loading time

Alternative for this component

There is also a commercial component from one of the most knowledgeable people on letting you Joomla site perform better The Joomla Performance Booster which cost $ 39,00 and comes with full support.

So if you need first class commercial support this one is a good choice..

And yes, I have all my wesbites and that of my customers now on this Extra Cache Component…
A new must have for your website.

You can Download the component from the IrcMaxell Download section !!
There are also some plugins specific for some other components like JomComment and JoomlaBoard if you use that..