Tips On How To Optimise A Joomla Site

Question

Joomla 3.9.12

What's the most effective way of optimising a Joomla website?

I'm not sure if my site is particularly large, details below;

• Files / folders 28GB
• Database 314MiB

When I take a backup of my site using Akeeba Backup, it's approx. 7.01 GB

My site isn't running slow, but i'd like to keep on top of it. I do have a lot of media files such as images and videos. I also have a few third party components installed such as EasyBlog and SP Page Builder.

I've tried to follow recommendations such as;

• compress css / js files
• optimise images (save for web)
• remove unnecessary components / plugins
• enable cache

Is there anything else I should be doing? In particular with the database.

Looking at my database there are a lot of tables prefixed #__j2store - I don't recall ever installing this so presumably it came with my site template (Joomshaper). I can't see any way of removing j2store via the Joomla back end - unless I manually drop these via the database there's no way of getting rid of them?

I have installed Admin Tools Core for Joomla, this comes with a feature to Repair & Optimise Tables which I have ran.

Answer 1

I'd suggest running an Audit using Chrome Dev Tools. This will gauge your site performance and give you more details about what you can do to improve it. Alernatively, you can use https://web.dev which also uses Lighthouse behind the scenes.

Seeing as you have a lot of assets, you'd ideally want to start lazy loading images. Chrome has a built-in attribute for this, however I'd strongly suggest using a Joomla plugin (or creating your own) to lazy load them....ensuring it will be applied across all browsers.

There are several other things that can be done, such as lazy loading CSS/JS files, but unless you're using a custom template, you're going to have to resort to a plugin.