Optimizing Joomla Websites For Speed – Choosing a Joomla Template

By Jan Pascal

Joomla is a very popular open-source content management system. It is used not only for personal pages or small projects, but also for some corporate sites. One of the reasons for popularity is the availability of thousands of extensions and templates for every imaginable web project. While plugins, modules and components are needed to add functionality to the original system, templates create the visual appearance of the website. You can choose from plethora of free templates and also a lot of professional templates that you can purchase for a small fee.

Choosing and installing a Joomla template is, at least in principle, a simple process. You find a template that you like and that represents the style of your website, you download the archive file and install it in the Joomla administration interface. After you set it as a default template it is already visible to the website visitors. But there are significant differences between Joomla templates.

Joomla template is a collection of files which constitute the backbone of every page. Its main element is the index.php file which defines the HTML layout and which also includes modules at predefined positions. Since this is a PHP code it needs to be processed in order to render the final HTML code which is then sent to the browser. This HTML page can include many JavaScript, CSS and other files which may be needed for proper page display or website functions. However, those additional files can also make any website much slower. Most Joomla templates with many bells and whistles are much slower than simple ones.

Fast loading of web pages should be the goal of every webmaster. Therefore it makes sense to check the template before it is adopted for the website. Checking it means examining the page source and looking at all the files that are loaded for each page. If there is more that one CSS file this may be the first indication of a poorly designed template. A lot of JavaScript files also means long times for page loading. Of course, those files are probably needed for proper functioning of the website. You only have to make sure that the template does not load files which are not needed.

In general, you select the template according to the visual appearance and required module positions. However, you should also pay attention to load times since the user experience should be an important aspect of every website.

The author likes simple websites that load quickly. One such example is the http://i2canalyzer.org/ website which provides information about various I2C analyzers. This website uses only one CSS style sheet and no JavaScript files. Of course some JavaScript files are still loaded, but they are not part of the template.

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