Website loading speed is a critical factor any website developer should consider. Generally, when a user visits a site, he will want the contents to appear as soon as he clicks. Nobody wants to wait too long to see the contents they search for. Making sure there websites aren’t slow loading ones has become a priority for online businesses as well.

Loading speed is also an issue of concern when it comes to search engine optimization. Search engines like Google now analyze the loading speed of a website page when ranking the page in search results. Google intends to provide the most relevant content to the users in the shortest time. So a slow loading website will eventually drop down in search engine ranks.

How can you speed up the website? Here are a few tips.

Database & Graphics Optimization

The Joomla database can become fragmented because of all the operations. So optimization is necessary. Although this only negligibly affects the page loading speed, it is still recommended. If your website has a lot of pages with a considerable amount of views, even millisecond time savings through database optimization can do wonders to your page rank in SERPs. 

Using the Akeeba Admin Tools extension in Joomla is one of the easiest ways to optimize your Joomla website, and it’s free as well. 

After installation,

• Go to Components tab in the Administrator panel
  
• Select Admin Tools
  
• Select Repair & Optimize Tables 
  

Graphics optimization is all about optimizing the graphics content in your website like images and videos. Make sure the file sizes are as small as possible without compromising the quality of the file. However, if you have already added a lot of images into your website template, use Smushit.

Use this web application to optimize the images in your website template. The images will be the same but with smaller sizes. This considerably increases the page loading speed. You can use this app to select and optimize images or provide URLs for the app to optimize in the background.

Content Delivery network

Most businesses use only one server for their websites. Some others invest in content delivery networks. Like the name suggests, it is a network of computers that contain a copy of the data in your website. They are established around the globe for the purpose of maximizing the bandwidths of your website’s visitors.  

This avoids the typical bandwidth limitations, in turn improving the website loading speed significantly. Rather than having a single server to serve the data to everybody who visits your website, you can use content delivery networks that serve the content from a server which is closest to the visitor’s geographic location.

They are affordable and are quite easy to deploy. You can use content delivery extensions for Joomla like MaxCDN, to work in conjunction with your content delivery networks. It won’t take a lot of time to configure the extension and the benefits are far too important to ignore.

These 3 simple hacks can make a noticeable difference in your Joomla website’s traffic. A faster loading website tends to tempt the users to click other links and explore more.