After working diligently on a website, we successfully reduced the total content for a page load from 13.7MiB's to 2.4, but unfortunately, the page still loads at a snail's pace.
This Joomla site is loaded with redundant DOM elements (2000+ for the home page) and makes 60+ HttpRequest's per page load including all the css, js, and image requests. Unlike Drupal, Joomla refuses to merge them all on the fly, leading to separate components which causes chaos in the system.
How can I enhance the load time of the page?
Here are the steps I've taken:
- Added colors to dom elements with large background images to load the color first
- Compressed excessively large images to smaller file sizes
- Reduced DOM elements from ~5000 to ~2000
- Loaded CSS at the beginning of the page and javascript at the end
- Unfortunately, Joomla inserts its own javascript and css at the header each time.
- Minified most javascript files
- Implemented caching and gziping on the server
With an uncached size of 2.4MB and cached around 300KB, the page still struggles to render due to the abundance of dom elements.
What else can be done to improve the load time?