Joomla SEO - How To Speed Up Joomla Homepage Load Time

Does your Joomla homepage take several seconds to load?

Here's a quick and very useful way of speeding up the load time of your Joomla powered website's homepage.

This might not work for everybody, depending on your site's hosting server configuration, but it should work for 80 - 90% of slow Joomla websites.

Speed Up Joomla - Create A Static HTML Homepage

Simply go to your site's home page.

Then view the source of the page, this can be done in most operating systems by a right click of the mouse on the webpage away from any images, a list of options are displayed one of which is 'View Page Source', click the link to reveal all the html of your webpage.

Press 'control (ctrl) + A' to select all the text and copy it, now using a text editor ( never ever MS Word), paste the html into the editor.

Save the file as 'index.txt', upload the file to the root of your website - most commonly known as public_html. Using a system called ftp is the preferred way, programs like WinSCP or FileZilla.

How To Make A Static Homepage In Joomla

Once the file has uploaded rename it to 'index.html'.

Basically what you now have is a flat html webpage acting as your homepage. All your javascript, CSS and images will still load, all you've done is remove the homepage from running database queries, reducing load time.

Faster Joomla - Static index.html Homepage

Give it a go, test the difference - it could take seconds off your homepage load time! Google are pushing webmaters to improve the efficiency of their websites and load time is a key factor in this.

How To Update Static Homepage ( index.html ) In Joomla

If you are constantly adding new articles and use a latest news type module on the homepage, then this might not be for you, as you will need to update the index.html file every time you add a new article.

You can create a cron job or similar process from your hosting control panel, to automatically update the index.html file every hour, two hours, day, etc.

To update your index.html file you will need to see an updated version of your homepage after edits/additions have been made. To do this simply add index.php to the end of your URL, example - http://www.deanmarshall.co.uk/index.php this will show you the updated version of your homepage.

Slow Joomla

Slow Joomla websites will be penalised by search engines, having a fast loading homepage is obviously an advantage. If this all seems too 'techy' for you, remember why you have a website, it's to make you money or serve the community it's designed for. Slow websites are even more annoying for people than they are for search engines. Keep your image file sizes down and build your template, navigation and content efficiently.

Setting Up Joomla

Setting up and speeding up Joomla websites is a skill, if you have issues and need professional Joomla help contact us, for a speedy service.