Information, Tutorials, Tips and Tricks

Joomla's default URLs, like the standard URLs of any CMS, are terrible for Search Engine Optimization purposes. They have several querystring parameters, they are not human readable, they offer search engines no keywords or insight into what content the page holds, and they use the Itemid parameter to create multiple URLs for each content item. Luckily there are Search Engine Friendly URL components available for Joomla that solve all these issues for us. 

Leaving Error Reporting set to anything else except NONE will slow down your website and give hackers a security hole that they can use to peer into your server settings and PHP environment. Turn it off (NONE) unless you are debugging at the moment. Then turn it off! 

One way to minimize the number of database queries your Joomla website performs is to turn off all website statistics. This is a quick fix, and removes queries for a part of Joomla you really don't need, speeding up your website and making faster load times.

If you have already applied the rest of these techniques and your server is still bogged down from too much traffic, you may have to purchase better hosting. Virtual servers and dedicated servers are common hosting plans that will give your web site the hardware it needs to handle high traffic server loads. 

Query caching will store the query results from your database in memory for quick retrieval. It won't always produce a noticeable difference in page load times, but it will free up your server resources by using far less processing power and minimizing bandwidth between your web server and MYSQL database server (for remote database servers). This means your Joomla website will be able to handle many, many more users without slowing down. Luckily for Joomla users, there is a query caching component to make things easy.