Joomla, PageSpeed Insights and the magic 100
If you've ever wondered, can you get a Joomla site that's quite extensive to a good PageSpeed Insights value? Maybe even achieve 100 points in all areas? Yes it works! With the relaunch of our site, we also took some measures to please Google even more and this is the result! 100 out of 100 for “Made Faster,” 100 out of 100 for Mobile “User Experience,” and 100 out of 100 for “ Suggestions Overview .” Below you will find a selection of points from PageInsights and the suggestions made for our Joomla site and a brief explanation of the points.
Reduce server response time
This refers to the first-to-byte behavior of your page and first-to-byte refers to the time required to generate and deliver the HTML output. Google likes anything under 200 ms. To achieve this value, the server must be good and you must at least use Joomla's internal caching mechanisms. Particularly sophisticated caching methods such as MemCache or Redis can increase performance even further. This means you can reduce the loading time to up to 100 - 150 ms. Going under 100 ms will actually be extremely difficult and should only be possible with great effort.
Optimize images
A classic among tips. JPG and PNG files should always be compressed to save valuable bandwidth. This is particularly important with mobile internet connections. What's the best way to do that? The professional will use Photoshop etc. to reduce the images, but as a beginner you can also use online tools such as jpegmini or tinypng. The results are sometimes astonishing, as images can sometimes be 1 MB in size and then only weigh 300 KB.
Reduce HTML, CSS and JS
Also the same as the pictures. Ideally, you should have as few and small CSS and JS files as possible. The best way to do this is with plugins that are available for Joomla.
Above the fold
There are also various plugins and methods for packing the styling in Joomla of the immediately visible area directly into the generated HTML file. This means that part of the page can be shown to the visitor the first time the HTML file is delivered. This allows the visitor to interact with the page while the remaining data is being loaded in the background.
Compression
Depending on the server, you can activate a variety of compression algorithms. There are simple options like gzip, which are very widely used. Then there is also the PageSpeed module from Google, which automatically optimizes almost all areas of the website. Unfortunately, this tool is not available from most shared hosts. However, ModPageSpeed does very little for Joomla sites that are already well optimized.
Conclusion!
With a good web host and an optimized Joomla, these values can be achieved without any problems. Joomla doesn't present any major hurdles. The biggest difficulties are with extremely bloated Joomla sites, which are full of countless extensions and lose a large part of the optimization options.
Would you also like to have your site optimized? Call us, maybe together we can reach