Make Joomla 1.5 Load Faster

Who doesn't want their site to be faster? I want my sites to be blazing fast, delivering content and design in microseconds... but microseconds is still a dream. Loading in milliseconds is possible with some effort.

Joomla 1.5 loads mootols library by default with every pageload. The mootools.js packages with Joomla 1.5 is located at "/media/system/js/mootools.js" and weighs a significant 72.6 kB. That can significantly lower the speed of your website, especially if the users are on low bandwidth connections.

By the way, if you want to check how fast your site is, you can check it out at our Website Speed Test Tool.

Now that we know that the mootools.js of Joomla 1.5 is big, what can we do? As discussed by , it is quite a complex process to get the right smaller version. However, you can get a compressed version from Google Ajax Tools by going to this link:http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/mootools/1.11/mootools-yui-compressed.js - this one is about 64 kB.

While you can reduce the size of mootools required for your site by trial and error as decsribed by Rick, it could be quite painful and may need to be done repeatedly whenever you install a new extension that may depend on a specific component of mootols that you may have removed.

You can get your own mootools.js from the official mootools website or build your own version here.

Yash July 13, 2008	Thank you! This is very useful.
Nick July 25, 2008	Even better than YUI compression is the Dean Edwards Packer http://dean.edwards.name/packer/ Just paste the code from the ORIGINAL mootools.js file supplied with Joomla (media/system/js) into it, click Pack and then copy the new code into a new file (moo2.php), rename the original and rename moo2 to mootools. That's it. Total size of mine is 43.2KB.
Marius January 30, 2009	Cheers, Nick, thanks for the tip! Now I'm optimizing all the js files :)
hiwaar December 31, 2009	I changed moto tools to the compreesed one, but the site is still showing very slow. any advice. I am using jiimla 1-5
Sanmathy January 19, 2010	Check your site loading time at http://tools.pingdom.com/ It will show you which image/script/css takes more time. optimize your site by compressing using cssjscompress and gzip. also try to uninstall unwanted plugins. Try to change template and check the loading time at pingdom. you can select the template with less loading time. Regards, San http://wayanad.co.in
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