One of the major aspects that you can do to increase the user satisfaction on your website is to decrease the page loading time. This factor is not only important for your website visitors but to help your website rank better on search engines. On this 3 series blog post we will take a deep look how can we can make your Joomla website run much more faster with the help of the marvelous IceSpeed plugin.

IceSpeed is a Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.6 Free Plugin developed by IceTheme. You may download it here for FREE.

After you have installed it through the default Joomla Installation process into your Joomla Administrator, you will be able to view this group of parameters on the IceSpeed plugin page. In this first series of 3 blog posts we will review only these parameters.

As you can see from the screenshot above, IceSpeed is built-in with some great features that can speed up your Joomla website easily and painlessly. Let's dig into the parameters...

The first parameter is the optimization engine that the IceSpeed plugin is currently using. We plan to make another one in the near future. However, at the moment we will stick with the Minify Engine which has proven in its own to be very stable. More information regarding the Minify Engine can be found here

The Second parameter, "Optimize HTML", can compress your HTML code that is generated into your Joomla website. We recommend you to be careful while enabling this feature as some Joomla Extensions may not output valid code and it can break your layout.  When we enable this parameter on our Corporate Template, and check the results through Firebug,  we notice that it has compressed the HTML code from 72kb to 54kb (18kb saved)

Now we have come to the interesting part. This is when the IceSpeed plugin shows its power. Again, after we look on the screenshot above, we can see  the parameters to compress and merge both CSS and JavasScript. To benefit the most from the IceSpeed plugin you should choose Compress and Merge on both parameters, which as the name suggests will compress the CSS and JS on your website and after that it will put all the files into a single one (of course 1 CSS file and 1 JavaScript file). Let's see the tests on our Corporate Template with the help with the FireBug add-on, following the enablement of the parameters.

On the screenshot above are shown the results before enabling the "Optimize CSS" parameter

And here we have the results when we have compressed and merged the CSS (also we have enabled the GZIP compression technology through the parameter below)  As you can see from the screenshot we have compressed CSS from 85.7 kb to just 14.9 kb. (more than 500%). But we have also merged the majority of the CSS files into a single one, which means fewer http requests, leading to an even faster website.

The same tests were done for the JavaScript files and with the GZIP technology on our IT Corporate template. So let's summarize the results for both CSS and JavaScript:

CSS

• Before Optimization: 85.7 kb
• After Optimization: 14.9 kb (more than 500%)

JS

• Before Optimization: 377.9 KB
• After Optimization: 96.3 KB (more than 350%)

Another feature that is available for the Joomla 1.6 version only is the "Lazy Load" parameter, which is especially useful when you have many images on your website (blogs/magazine websites can have lots of images). What the Lazy Load feature does is that it blocks the loading of those images below the fold. So the images that your website visitor is currently viewing are displayed (loaded) and the other images, which are not currently shown on the screen but are below the fold, are blocked. When your website visitors then scroll the page, they are displayed (loaded) with a nice fade effect. This technique will save your many KB, especially if your images are large and numerous.

This is the first part of a 3 series of blog pots here at IceTheme to explain the power of the IceSpeed plugin. On the 2 other parts we will cover the Cache feature that the IceSpeed is built-in so that you may push the turbo button into your Joomla website and on the third part we will explain some other points that we do to fasten again your website with methods like CDN. Also we will provide same cautions that you should keep in mind when making use of the IceSpeed plugin