High Perfomancea guide for optimizing the performance

of Joomla! websites

by Fotis Evangelou (JoomlaWorks)

www.joomlaworks.gr

Joomla!Days Netherlands - 12 & 13 June 2009

www.joomlaworks.gr

What's covered in this session

• Basic principles of web content delivery

• Prepare Joomla! for prime time

• Optimize our template and our content

• Configure hosting

Basic principles of web content delivery

www.joomlaworks.gr

The closer the server is to the user, the better- DNS lookups (avoid redirects)- The concept of the CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Browsers use 2 HTTP connections per domain to download content- Increase website download time using subdomains/CDN- Combine CSS files- Combine Javascript files- Combine layout images into sprites

All modern browsers accept compressed content sent from the server- Compress HTML, CSS and Javascript code

Prepare Joomla! for prime time

www.joomlaworks.gr

Prepare the tools for your work- Install Firefox with Firebug, YSlow and Web Developer Toolbar

Global Configuration- Enable Joomla!'s built-in cache mechanism- Enable GZIP

Extensions- Choose extensions that properly separate content from layout/behaviour – disable their CSS/JS includes and call CSS/JS code into your template where possible.- Enable caching for modules

Optimize our template and our content

www.joomlaworks.gr

- Combine and compress - using Gzip - CSS/JS files

- Do not pack your JS code, feel free to minify

- Use one JS library/framework

- Initiate JS code into as little onload events as possible

- Put all your layout (non-content) images as background images in

your template's CSS file

- Combine all your layout non-repeating images into one big image

(sprite), use CSS positioning to display

Optimize our template and our content

www.joomlaworks.gr

- Resize/resample content images manually or use a plugin to do

that

- Understand when to use GIF, PNG or JPEG

- Enable debug in Joomla!, check the number of queries with

cache on and off. Identify slow queries in PHP code.

- Dynamically replace URLs to point to subdomains/CDN

(make site.com/images/ show up as images.site.com)

Configure hosting

www.joomlaworks.gr

- Optimize MySQL depending on your needs and taget audience

- Use a CDN for image, CSS, JS and other static content delivery

- Split website load into 2 servers (if possible): one acts as web

server, the other as database server

Case study: gazzetta.gr

www.joomlaworks.gr

Thank you

www.joomlaworks.gr