The speed at which your site loads is very important. Firstly,
a fast loading site will have your readers stick around longer. If they are served content fast, it is more tempting to click on another link to read more. Nobody wants to wait for a slow site.Secondly, speed has become a major issue when it comes to SEO. Search engines, and particularly Google, now take the loading speed of a page into consideration when ranking the page for result pages. In particular, slow loading sites will be pushed down in the search results. The reason is that Google wants to serve its users with the most relevant content available, and in the shortest time possible. Giving people links to slow sites is not a good idea, so fast-loading sites will now appear higher in the search engine result pages.There are several things you can do to optimize your Joomla site for speed. One way is to limit the use of installed extensions. In this post, you’ll learn some more ways to improve the loading speed of your Joomla site.Optimizing imagesIn my opinion, images make up an important part of any blog. A good image can underscore and improve the content of your posts. I believe you should use images in every post you create. Perhaps not overuse it, but try to use illustrations where it can improve the content. For instance, I’m using charts, tables and screenshots a lot on joomlablogger.net. It is sometimes easier to understand a concept when it’s illustrated as well as explained with text.On the other hand, using too many images can slow down the loading of your blog. If your reader’s are mostly in countries with high bandwidth internet access, it’s normally not a problem. However, if your site is accessed by people living in low bandwidth areas, you might need to think differently.I have a good friend who runs a couple of blogs in India. He uses almost no images in his posts. His readers mostly have low bandwidth available to them when browsing. If it came down to a choice between a slow site and hires images on my blog, I would choose speed. More about that in the SEO chapter.Using CSS spritesThe technique of using CSS Sprites is a great idea. It can save your site from a lot of HTTP requests, which in turn will save load time.A CSS sprites are images shown on your site, that are actually one large image. The browser will load the large image once, and then use CSS to show parts of the image only in different parts of the site.Some sites take this technique to the extreme, using one image for the entire template imagery. One such example is the extremely fast-loading free template Afterburner from RocketTheme.Sprites are not little images like in an 80’s video game. A sprite is actually one big image. Have you ever seen the CSS technique where the «on» and «off» states of a button are in the same image? That is done by changing the background-position for the image container. That saves time, as the image is loaded only once.CSS Sprites is a more advanced application of that technique. The difference is that instead of just two or three images being combined into one, you can combine an unlimited number of images into one. The origin of the term “sprites” comes from old school computer graphics and the video game industry. The idea was that the computer could fetch a graphic into memory, and then only display parts of that image at a time, which was faster than having to continually fetch new images. The sprite was the big combined graphic. affordable clipping path service