Marketing on the WebLast year Google said that load times would become a factor in determining your page rank. I have been toying with Joomla load times trying to speed things up and found two things that are very effective (and easy):
- In the >Global Configuration panel under >Server, enable gzip compression (duh!)
Using this, the content the server send the info to the browser compressed so bandwidth isn’t as big of an issue. - Install a CSS/Java compression plug-in. I used a plug-in CssJsCompress to great effect, be sure to configure Css/JS compression and enable the plug-in after you install it.
Using this, the CSS and Java scripts are compressed.
The sites I have on godaddy have had no issues with these changes and I have measured significant improvements in load times.
More technical details can be found here: https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
To test performance, I recommend using a combination of Firebug and Page Speed plug-ins in Firefox.
I am still investigating ways to speed up WordPress, if you have some recommendations let me know!
Good article on determining if you have speed issues here:
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2017/06/02/how-to-optimize-your-mobile-site-speed-testing-for-issues/