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Joomla maintenance strategy
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- 3345 hits Updated: 16 January 2018 Blog
What things do you have to do to maintain a Joomla website?
The four skills for highly-effective websites
What are the things … to be done to maintain Joomla website?forum user, Joomla Forum, 10-Aug-2017
The question of “website maintenance” (and Joomla website maintenance, in particular) is a fairly simple one and, I suppose, anyone could scribble a few notes on a scrap of paper or point to articles posted online that itemise the first things coming to mind: security, backups, regular updates, etc.—the “usual” household chores. Everyone has their own routine and there’s a general consensus about what matters should receive the highest priority. However, when you really think about the subject seriously, most of us don’t plan for future-proofing our sites so that they can be maintained with relatively little effort. Perhaps some projects commence that way but they evolve into a tangled web of complexity with internal dependencies that we wish, in hindsight, we hadn’t done. The bottom-line is that no-one likes housework; most of us don’t even enjoy any routine work.
In this article I will present the “four skills” strategy for highly-effective websites. So, before you sharpen your pencils and take notes—or frame a printed copy of the article and place it on your desk—we will look at the big picture: what do you require—what skills do you require—to prepare a website effectively in order to maintain it efficiently?
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Site performance—caching and file aggregation—is it worth it?
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- 3307 hits Updated: 10 January 2018 Blog
Disable Joomla’s cache features
CSS/Javascript file aggregation: who needs it?
I wrote previously about the general theory of website caching. There are circumstances when site caching can be useful and there are other circumstances—especially when people are attempting to diagnose, analyse and solve operational issues—when caching can become a headache. As a general point, caching can be useful where “speed”—as far as the end user is concerned—is the number one criterion.
Similarly, when people turn to Google for recommendations on ways to “improve” [the end user perception of] performance, we find suggestions about using file aggregation, minification or obfuscation methods. These are not related to caching but they are involved in overall “site performance” for want of a better description.
The bottom-line is that website caching, data compression and file aggregation/minification/obfuscation may help—and there is empirical evidence to support that contention—but they add administration overheads and, ultimately, their presence may not be beneficial—and there is a body of anecdotal evidence to support this opinion. The problems caused by caching et al are the subjects of thousands of discussions in online technical forums; in most cases these problems are quickly and effortlessly resolved by disabling or removing those facilities. This article provides information on the common techniques that people employ in Joomla and how to disable such features that they’ve (perhaps unwittingly) enabled or installed.
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To cache or not to cache?
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- 3112 hits Updated: 07 December 2016 Blog
What is web caching?
Types of caches
Caching: benefits and disadvantages
There are many myths about caching—for example, some people believe that HTTPS does not cache web pages—but there’s a lot of ignorance about how to use caching effectively. This article doesn’t have all the answers but it may help people learn about web caching and some of the benefits, costs and risks associated with how you use it.
A web cache (or HTTP cache) is an information technology for the temporary storage of web documents, such as HTML pages and images, to reduce bandwidth usage, server load and perceived lag.[1] Because generating web content over the internet is both slow and expensive and, in today’s fast-paced and time-constrained world, most people’s attention span barely survives one or two seconds, one of the main purposes of caching is to improve the user experience. Large responses for information can involve many roundtrips between the client and server which delays when they are available and when the browser can process them, and also incur data costs for the visitor. In other words, caching helps reduce the cost involved between when the user clicks a mouse/presses a key/taps a screen and when an “event” (such as displaying a new web page) occurs.
The ability to cache and reuse previously fetched resources is a critical part of optimising for performance. The wrong use of caching, on the other hand, can also be counter-productive as we shall discuss.
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