Regardless of how compelling your Joomla site may be, if it loads slowly, you're very likely to lose visitors. Joomla is an incredibly advanced content management system that offers many significant benefits, but it can become bogged down and start performing slowly. If you've noticed significant amounts of latency on your Joomla site, it may be time to make adjustments.
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Update your back-end technology and infrastructure
Often, your hosting provider may be the cause of any latency on your site. Many hosts allow you to check on any bandwidth or CPU throttling that is occurring on your account. Ask your host directly whether your account may be exceeding their processing or memory limits. If so, speeding up your website will require switching to another hosting provider that specializes in Joomla or another hosting package. Joomla sites are often very complex and require significant amounts of system resources.
If your service provider is not to blame, make sure that you have updated your Joomla to the most current version as well as all of the applicable extensions. The newest versions of Joomla tend to be more conservative when using resources.
Look towards your content and your design
If there doesn't seem to be any technological reason why your website would be running slowly, the answer may be more mundane. Your website may simply be taking a long time to load. If you have large images, music files or video files on your website, you may need to compress them further to optimize your loading times. While many people today have high-speed Internet service there is also a significant demographic that browses the Web purely on mobile devices. These visitors may not have a fast Internet connection or the bandwidth necessary to load your site.
Manage your media by both compressing your media files and adjusting where and when they show up on your site. It's better to have a single video on a page than multiple videos and it's better to have thumbnails loading on your site than full images. When hosting multiple videos, move them to a video service rather than hosting them yourself. This will reduce your overall bandwidth utilization and increase your loading times.
Optimize your site through extensions
There are special extensions that can speed up your site significantly, such as extensions that cache your site to ensure that users don't need to load redundant items. Too many extensions can also bog down your site as too many processes will be running at the same time. Ideally, cut back on as many extensions as you possibly can. If your website is having significant issues, turn off all of your extensions and then bring them back one by one in order of necessity. This allows you to identify which extensions are causing the problem.
Joomla is a versatile content management system that is often much faster than other systems. Despite this, it may need a little modification to work as desired. With a little management, you should be able to get your Joomla site running quickly. However, if you find that nothing you do seems to help it's very likely that your issue is with your host rather than your software. Advanced Joomla websites will often require a dedicated server or a virtual private server to work properly.