Check website speed
As soon as you publish your site you should make sure that your site is as fast as possible. Slow sites may not necessarily make your SEO rankings drop, however, if a visitor tries to access your site and it takes more then a few seconds to load the site, he might leave the site before it loads. This is registered as a bounce by Google, and will raise the bounce rate. A general rule of thumb is to keep the time needed to load your site under 2 seconds. There are a few sites that can measure the speed for you:
- PageSpeed Insights from Google
- Y-slow (as a browser extension)
- Pingdom Tools
- GT-metrix (combines Pagespeed Insights and Y-slow in one go)
- Webpagetest.org
Usually you will receive some input about what's good and what isn't. You should be aiming at a Score close to 100, and a load-time of less then 2 seconds:
What is also good about these tools is that all provide a lot of details of why a site runs slow, or general advice about this. Fortunately, for most issues there is a solution, either within the Joomla core (like caching or Gzip), or using an extension.