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with testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com i tested an old Joomla 1.5 website and i got really bad results. I managed to working on some points and it was succesfull. Now i have a few points open.

Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content.

What could i do on this points? The Joomla is old and putting all js files into one or compressing css is destroying the site and its not working.

Is there any other way how could i work around this point?

This is also influencing the points with Minify CSS, Minify HTML, Minify JavaScript. I tried a few things with Javascript async or embeding JS on the end of site, but then the site is not working.

Does anyone have any experince on this CSS and JS thing with Google testing Tool, that could give me some good advice on how to work with it?

4 Answers 4

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One thing I'd be wary of is that anything you do to solve this is going to require extensions to Joomla's core behaviour, which is going to make your server-side code less streamlined.

Google's tool really shouldn't be viewed as a definitive list of what needs to be done to a site - it is only a list of suggestions based on what they are able to detect from the client side. The overall score is the only important bit. Render blocking isn't going to be the only thing slowing down a page load. They suggest aiming for 85%+ - it does not need to be 100%.

Ultimately, it being a CMS is going to be one of the main things slowing your site down - each page has to be processed before display. As such, caching is often something that can speed up a page load if you are not making use of that.

If your site has no interactive functionality on it at all, then it may even be possible to generate a completely static copy of the site to serve to users, and only use the CMS for making updates.

I'd also review any extensions you are using - often third party ones can be pretty bulky, especially if they add their own instance of JQuery (bad extensions will often ignore the inbuilt js library - which I believe was Mootools on 1.5).

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First of all, anything about 85 with Google PageSpeed Insights is very good. No need to literally dissect your website just to get a higher score. 85 is good - more is overkill and really not necessary.

Many websites end up with (subtle) broken features because of all the weird optimization especially on the CSS and the JS files. I don't think Google itself respects its PageInsight rules (we can't know for sure because PageSpeed insights is blocked from accessing Google). Even Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce website has a score of around 65, Yahoo has around 70, and YouTube has a score of 75 (its score for mobile is 63).

Ensure that your website is clean and HTML compliant and mobile friendly, don't have a lot of CSS/JS files, take care of your content and titles, make sure that your server responds quickly and you should be all set.

I wouldn't recommend using JCH Optimize, it's a mess, and rare (very rare) are those who can configure it to work properly on their Joomla website.

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Joomla 1.5 is not supported anymore, which means that is difficult to find current compatible extensions, software, tips, techniques and overall support.

Upgrading to latest Joomla would be the best thing you could do for many reasons including performance, considering the fact that you want to optimize the website for performance, which makes me think that it is an important site for you that you care of.

In any case, keep in mind that the speed optimization tasks you described above that are still concerning you, hardly work out of the box without tweaking and experimenting, even when you use a plugin like JCH Optimize.

So, you have to keep working on these tasks, in order to reach to the desired outcome and ensuring that anything you do doesn't break the functionality. There is no 1 single golden rule on how to do this without breaking the site, as each site is totally different. So it's up to you to build the proper solution.

There is only one solution that I have seen giving the best results with the minimum hassle... and that is CloudFlare.

So you could combine any custom work you can do at your own with a free Cloudflare account and achieve good results. In addition, Cloudflare will add an extra bit layer of security on your J1.5 site.

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I am afraid that you are just out of luck trying to find suitable solution for such an old version of Joomla.

If that was a site on current version of Joomla I would right away suggest to try with great optimization plugin JCH Optimize, but even though they keep extensive list of old releases of plugin in their Downloads section, last version compatible with Joomla 1.5 was v1.3.4, which you just can't download anymore.

Same problem exists with any other extension I would recommend, because I have used a lot of them, but that was 4-5 years ago...

Now... besides reasonable advice to upgrade/migrate that old site to J!3.6, for many reasons, out of which performance is least important, I have nothing else to suggest. :-(

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