Review - JCH Optimize Joomla Plugin - Speed Up Your Joomla Website

Joomla websites can be slow, especially if you have a lot of extensions installed. Slow page speeds drive customers away from your website. Furthermore, since Google might consider page speed in its ranking, it's more important than ever to have fast page speeds. JCH Optimize, a plugin for Joomla, is a fast, free, and easy way to speed up your site immediately.

A client called me and asked it I could optimize his site for speed. I checked out his site and found that it seemed to load pretty fast, or as least as fast as the dozens of different sites I visit every week. But to get a more quantitative measure of the site speed, I installed Google Page Speed and tested his site. The site speed score was 75. Then I tested my site and the page speed was 67. Speed scores are like grading curves and 67 is failing.

Two of the biggest speed drains on my site were multiple CSS files and Javascript files. Since almost every Joomla extension comes with it's own style sheet and javascript, the more extensions you have, the more of a speed drain on your site.

After some quick research, I found JCH Optimize, a Joomla plugin whose purpose is to speed up your site. Once I installed and configured JCH Optimize, my page speed rank went immediately from 67 to 78, an 11 point improvement. A 78 puts brings my site up to a passing grade. Certainly not the fastest site, but not the slowest either.

In fact, I did some page speed tests on other high-profile sites and after that I felt more comfortable with my improved page speed.

Note: All page speed scores are for the home page only. Often, sub pages are much faster since they don't have as much media and images as the home page.

• writenowdesign.com - 78


• Apple.com - 68


• Joomla.org - 74


• Macworld.com - 71


• Microsoft.com - 79


• nytimes.com - 64

Keep in mind that the more information you have on a page, the lower your page speed. Add movies, flash, AJAX, and lots of nice images, and your page speed will go down. Also, database driven websites like Joomla and WordPress are inherently slower that static web pages.

JCH Optimize speeds up your site by doing the following:

• Minimizes css and javascript. This means it removes all line ends and comments.


• Combines css files into one file.


• Combines javascript files into one file.


• Gzips the combined css files.


• Gzips the combined javascript files.


• In addition, it can minimize all of your html output, but I did not use this feature.

JCH is easy to configure, and you can choose to turn on only some of the features. In fact, you might have to exclude some Joomla components or individual javascript files from JCH Optimize because the minimizing and combining of the files might create conflicts that break your javascript functions.

For example, I had to exclude AllVideos Reloaded because the javascript optimization made it so my YouTube movies did not play in Internet Explorer 8 (no big surprise since Internet Explorer is the most troublesome and buggy of all the browsers).

There are some negative affects caused by JCH optimize, but if you know about them, you can work around the issues. When JCH Optimize is turned on, any edits you make to javascript or css files are not immediately recognized. As a result, I recommend that you use JCH Optimize only after all of your development work is done. If you need to make modifications to a javascript or css file, first turn off JCH and then make your changes. Once you are done with your changes, you can turn JCH back on.

I highly recommend this plugin if you want to instantly speed up your Joomla Website. Thanks to the developer of this GREAT plugin: Samuel Marshall.