Today's Joomla tip is to compress your CSS and JS for quicker page load speeds.
Joomla websites, especially ones built with third-party templates, can have multiple CSS style sheets and scripts. Each of these style sheets and scripts takes a bit of time to download to a user's browser and if there's enough of them, they can slow your initial page load speeds to a crawl.
I've been able to take several sites from C- and D-grade speed ratings in YSlow to A-grade page speed simply by compressing the site's CSS and JS using the CSSJSCompress plugin. In addition, this nifty plugin also GZips the compressed CSS and JS files to further enhance page loading speed.
A few tips about using this plugin are in order:
Tip 1: Make sure you get the latest version (v3.5 at this writing) of the plugin from the site linked above as there was an earlier version (v3.3) that had a security vulnerability.
Tip 2: If and when you should need to edit any of your CSS or script files, you will have to disable this plugin or your changes won't take effect.
Tip 3: After you disable the plugin to make some CSS or Javascript tweaks, be sure to visit your Tools > Clean Cache panel in the Joomla admin and delete both the CSS and JS caches. Do this before you start tweaking your CSS or Javascript files.
Tip 4: Remember to clear your browser cache as well because if you have the Gzip feature turned on, the Gzip file will be cached in your browser, so clear that out as well.
To conclude, I can't recommend this plugin enough. If there's one thing I know that will drive people away from your site it's slow page load speeds, so get this plugin and make your site users happy :)
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