Let us give you a quick example: yesterday, we got a call from a very nice client telling us that his server comes to a crawl when they send out newsletters. He told us that his traffic peak is 5K to 7K visitors, and that peak traffic happens once every one or two months (when they send out the newsletters). On normal days they get only a few hundred visitors. He told us that he thought that there was something from within Joomla causing this issue, but he also told us that the CMS was powered by a server with 2GB of RAM. Yes, you read that right, that’s two gigs of RAM (by the way, is it gig as in garage or jig as in giraffe?), which was really odd. We immediately stated that we can’t work on such a server, and that they must upgrade to a server with at least 16GB of RAM in order for us to work on the server.
So, why did we do that?
First, we know what Joomla is and we know that 2GB of RAM is not nearly enough, even for a small website. Keep in mind that the 2GB of RAM is not solely dedicated to the web server and the database server, but there are many other resources to share it. In our opinion, a small Joomla website must run on a 16GB server, and a large Joomla site must run on a 256GB server.
Second, in most of these cases, upgrading to a better server typically solves the problem. This will of course save the client money on the short run and on the long run, despite the additional monthly overhead for the hosting company.
Third, debugging and working on slow servers and/or servers with low memory (typically a slow server is also a server with low memory) is not very efficient, as we will also be fighting the restricted environment (and not just some rogue plugins on the Joomla website).
So, before asking a company to optimize your Joomla website, make sure that your environment provides ample power for your Joomla website to run properly. If it doesn’t, then you should upgrade to a more powerful server before asking for a costly optimization.
To rank higher on Google, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that your Joomla site runs smoothly without any delay. Here is what happens when your site lags for just one second according to Kissmetrics.
- 40% of visitors will abandon your site
- You’ll potentially lose 7% of your conversions. If you’re making $100,000 per day, you’ll lose $2.5 million in sales by the end of the year.
- Customer satisfaction will drop by 16%, and they may never visit your site again.
Most of the case user experience depends on your site speed then speed affects SEO and SEO affects your ranking. A survey says that If a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, over a quarter of users won’t click away. Once you exceed that load time, you can optimize your Joomla website and rank higher on Google.
In the same survey says, 73% of users reported that visiting a website that loaded too slow discourage them to click over. Even Google considered page speed as one of the ranking factors for its search index and to guarantee mobile web pages optimum speed they created AMP.
When someone visits your site and loads a page, Joomla will load all the necessary features and components to present the page as well as possible. By enabling the Joomla cache, Joomla will remember all of the elements so the next time someone visits the same page again, it will load much faster.
To create such content, you have to really know what the audience is looking for. This way, you can create content that caters to their needs and interests. Conduct keyword research using tools like Ahrefs to know what keywords are currently popular. You can also visit forums like Reddit and Quora to find out the hot trending topics among internet users.
After you’ve found the keywords, proceed to create content based on those keywords. Make sure your title, headings, and subheadings contain your targeted keywords. And don’t get stuck on just creating articles. Including content like videos on your page can actually attract more attention, as videos currently make up 74% of online traffic.
This way, Google and other search engines will quickly understand the content of your webpage that the URL represents, making it much more likely to rank higher. To change your URL, just go to your website’s Joomla Global Configuration. Then, set the “Search Engine Friendly URLs” and “Use URL Rewriting” to “Yes”.
The second thing you need to do is to decide whether your URL will use the www-prefix or not. Unlike WordPress, Joomla doesn’t automatically redirect your page to a specific “www” URL. It means that if you don’t choose one, your page will have 2 different URLs. Google will think that you have duplicate content and penalize you for it.
It doesn’t really matter what you choose, as long as you choose one URL and make the other inaccessible.