Hi Guys,

From time to time I drop in here to let others know of positive experiences I have with various plugins and the like. I have been working lately on understanding how pages load and what slows them down.

The problem that I have been having is finding a plugin to compress both javascript and css files before I even look at the countless other things that slow a page load down.

I first used CssJsCompress plugin that works in principle and is a good plugin however I found something a little better.

jFinalizer www.farbfinal.de/jfinalizer#download (please read all instructions and follow them)

After testing my site went from a C rating in YSlow to an A rating and page speeds went from 65 up to 80. I had never seen that before, even when I checked Googles home page)

It cleans up all the code, merges all your external files, compress & caches it all for a much faster site display & browsing!

Only one drawback: no poorly coded extension allowed (JCE utilities crashed it) or it will break! (but you can adjust the level of compression to solve this) - So it's an extension quality tester as well

So if your into compressing your files and having this plugin to do a bit more than cssjscompress to get better page load speeds and willing to put the time in to understand this plugin, the results are really worth it.

The results speak for themselves

Super karma bump coming your way mate

LOL now I get to come back as a butterfly and not a dog turd....keep those Karmas coming

Hey Jason got it to rock on my avante site studiooic.com

However it doesnt like the css grid craig-james.com.au and praise conc.com.au

It seems captify css script is the culprit however I aint good enough yet to find exactly whats breaking it in captify.

The validator likes captify so am lost however overall it did make a difference to all 3 esp studiooic

Glad u liked that little post

Cheers
Craig

Hey Craig,

Do you get an error when it compresses the css? It could be something that can be fixed. You could leave the captify.css file out of the compression process. I believe the plugin allows to exempt files. You could do that till we find a solution.
The issue might simply be the comments or some spacing the captify.css file.

Cheers,
Jason.

Hi Jason,

Thanx 4 ya reply....

Forget the captify mumbo jumbo of mine.... I compressed it manually and it is fine.

its with the processing of the css from both grid and Praise before the compression

JFinalizer doesnt have a section like CSSJScompress to exclude files, it wants them all to be correct or nothing.

I just went through and manually compressed all the recommended css files using YUI CSS compressor and no change to either Praise or Grid

The Avante template however accepted this plugin without any css error, graded A and has a page load of 80 using YSlow. Being my web design site im wrapped at this. Google from the day I got this right jumped dramatically in time spent indexing my site.... interesting

Its OK, im learning heaps and will no doubt find the answer. The Avante was the first template I used with Zen core, so it will be interesting if Zen is the reason and will test this hunch when I build my next Zen core site. Less CSS files and better organised, if ya know what I mean.

Thanks for your advice mate I will keep looking into it and learning as I go.

I feel the need for speed!

Cheers
Craig

Tried both CssJsCompress and JCH Optimize separately. They seem to do what they say, at least in YSlow where our rating went up to 81 at one point. The homepage still needed 15 seconds.

But had a Javascript conflict with the Open Panel and uninstalled both to simply use our Joomla Bamboo Template settings. Noticed no lowering of site performance, although YSlow score 'fell' to a steady 70.

Seems the best way to really improve homepage speed is to slim down the modules and activate the global cache (modules permitting). We did just this and the homepage is now loading in 3-4 seconds.

ps YSlow said JCH Optimize Sprites still had to be maxmised despite activating the settings to the full in the plugin.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, it is always useful to hear of real-world tests like this.

On experience (limited I admit) i think there is no need for an extension.

Go with the Joomla parameters and good SEO

I think it makes a big difference actually to reduce the number of requests the page makes.

The next version of the framework is going to do this by itself and basically wrap all of the files from our templates and extensions into two files.

Cheers Anthony