Fact: Google is probably going to add “Page Speed” as one of its many ranking factors. Fact: Joomla websites often get a marginal page speed ranking. Do you need to worry if you have a Joomla Website?

Unless your Joomla website is very slow, you probably don’t need to worry that page speed rank is bringing down your Google ranking. It can, however, help your Google ranking to have your pages load as fast as possible. More importantly, fast page speeds might improve your web site sales or conversions. Web users do not like to wait for pages to load. If your site is slow, the user might move on to another site, and you lose a sale or a conversion.

There are several things you can do to speed up your website:

• First, visit Google Page Speed site and read about the techniques you can use to speed up your pages.
• Download Google’s Page Speed software for Firefox (In order to use Google Page Speed, you also need Firebug, a Firefox plugin). Page Speed software allows you to analyze the speed of each page on your site.
• If you have a Joomla 1.5 website, install JCH Optimize Joomla Plugin. This plugin automatically optimizes page speed by minimizing and combining all javascripts and css files. In addition, it will minimize all of your HTML code. All of these steps can increase your page speed instantly by 10%.

Visit Google’s Page Speed site and download the Page Speed software. Once you install it, you can quickly determine if your site is slow. The ranking goes from 0-100 and the speed you get is like a standard high school grading curve. 70 is a C, 80 is a B, and 90 or above is an A.

• Below 70: D – If your site is below 70, your page speed is failing and you need to do something about it.
• 70-80: C – If your page speed is between 70-80, you have a C and room to improve.
• Above 80: B – If you page speed is above 80, you can probably improve it, but you’re doing OK.
• Above 90: A – If your page speed is above 90, keep up the good work.

If you determine that your pages need a speed boost but have no idea how to do it, talk to your webmaster and determine what it will cost to speed up your site. If you’re site failed the speed test, you can’t afford to ignore it.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 9:08 am and is filed under Joomla, Joomla Extensions, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.