PHP code for web sites and web applications should always be optimized. A poorly-written PHP web site may work just fine without too many concurrent users, but as soon as traffic starts building up it could buckle. There are an unlimited number of ways to implement anything in PHP, but certain functions and techniques are much more efficient than others. Every PHP developer should spend some time learning the most efficient ways to code, and luckily there is a great tutorial article with 52 PHP programming tips and benchmarked examples for efficiency and faster code.

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(This Joomla/adsense tutorial is for Joomla 1.0.x)

According to Google, the most effective placement for AdSense ads is directly in your content. Click through rates (CTR) are much higher for ads embedded in your content than banner ads or sidebar ads. The standard Joomla content component combines each article's intro text and main text, which means you don't have an opportunity to run a plugin or component to automatically insert your ads after the intro text. Fortunately I have come up with a method using the JosReplace component and a small hack to Joomla's content component which will allow you to do this. 

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Joomla uses PHP to create the HTML pages that make up your website. These pages can be compressed using Gzip Compression. Most web servers support Gzip Compression, which can shrink your site's pages by 70% to 90%. This will result in reduced bandwidth and faster page loads for your visitors. 

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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. 

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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! 

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