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When running a joomla 1.5 website you may have many articles, virtuemart products, components and templates installed which will slow down your website exponentially! In many cases you may not have the money to switch to a VPS or dedicated server from a shared hosting environment and may need to speed up your site with your witty coding and optimization skills. I have put together a guide which will speed up your loading time by at least a few seconds!
1. Turn on Joomla Cache You should proceed to global configuration > System turn on the cache, this will improve your initial loading time. 2. Turn on Gzip Page Compression To turn this on proceed to global configuration > Server and switch the option to yes. 3. Download the Query Cache Component Download the joomla query cache component here when you install this make sure you do not have joomla legacy turned on or it will not work. 4. Download the PHPSpeedy Joomla 1.5 Plugin PHPspeedy is a script which will compress your javascript and CSS files, along with gzip compression, there are many plugins out there that do this separately, this plugin does it all. You can download it here. 5. Turn on cache for all of your modules. All modules on your website have the option to have cache turned on, do this for all modules that are published through out your website. 6. Delete all white space and comments from your template index.php file. Your template will have many white spaces and comment tags through out the code, delete this space and it will take off a few miliseconds of loading time on your website. 7. Optimise your websites images. Your website may have many large image files which will slow down the loading time, you should aim for images on the jpeg and PNG format to be around 10kbs. When saving as GIF it will be of lower quality though the file will be smaller. If you are using photoshop use the save for web option to get the best results from your image files. 8. Test your sites loading time with firefox plugins. Now you should reap the rewards from your optimization work! You can do this with a few tools I would like to recommend. The first one is Tamper Data for firefox. Another tool and plugin you can use for firefox is called YSlow, this is an addon for firebug for firefox. Your site should now load faster then before, I hope this may be helpful to the people dedicated to joomla 1.5 like I am!
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