We installed Aimy Speed Optimization on a few of our customer sites to see which results are possible with this Joomla! plugin. We present these results measured with Google™ PageSpeed Insights in the following article.
What is Aimy Speed Optimization?
This Joomla! extension improves the page speed of your website by optimizing several elements like CSS, JavaScript and HTML. This way the rendering of each page will be faster.
For details on features and technology please have a look at the product description.
What is Google™ PageSpeed Insights?
PageSpeed Insights is an online tool provided by Google™. It analyses the page speed of a URL and takes several criteria into account. Besides the analysis, it gives useful suggestions on what can and should be optimized.
A lot of these suggestions are implemented by Aimy Speed Optimization.
The performance is measured on a scale from 1 to 100. You can test three aspects: mobile speed, mobile user experience and desktop speed. The user experience is not evaluated in this case study as it is not influenced by the page speed.
Page Speed Results
The tests show the results before and after the installation, configuration and activation of the plugin. On all website, the following options were enabled: eliminate render blocking (CSS and JavaScript), browser caching and compression.
Website ao-ruhr.de
The desktop version was rated with 72 before the plugin was installed and with 97 afterwards - that is an increase by 25 points.
The mobile version started at 60 points and gained 36 points to 96.
This website does not have a responsive design. Therefore the user experience is not rated very well and the overall result should still be optimized - but nevertheless page speed results could be increased a lot: (screenshots taken on October 14, 2015)
Desktop Results
Google and the Google Logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc. - used with permission.
Google and the Google Logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc. - used with permission.
Website dilape.de
This website uses an offsite CSS resource, namely Google™ Fonts. Aimy Speed Optimization handles offsite resources so they will not block rendering as well -- if this is technically possible (have a look at the documentation for details).
At the start of the test, the desktop version was rated 59 points. After installing Aimy Speed Optimization the site won 27 points - Google™ PageSpeed rated the page with 86 points afterwards. In order to gain an even better rating, the images used on the website could be optimized in size.
The mobile version scored 50 points and was boosted by 31 points to 81.
On this website, the HTML minification feature of Aimy Speed Optimization has been activated. However, Google™ PageSpeed still recommends to minify the HTML code. In fact, there are a few bytes left that could be optimized. As the minification of HTML is a non-trivial task that itself costs resources to be accomplished, Aimy Speed Optimization's current implementation focusses on a fast and useful minification without aiming to optimize and handle every corner-case. This way, minification is both fast and effective: (screenshots taken on October 14, 2015)
Desktop Results
Google and the Google Logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc. - used with permission.
Google and the Google Logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc. - used with permission.
Website visioneblu.com
This website already started with 85 points on desktop and 72 points on mobile page speed. Nevertheless, both could be optimized to a page speed value of 97 points.
Google™ PageSpeed still recommends to leverage browser caching for one resource loaded to integrate Google™ Analytics. As this one is loaded externally, activating browser caching is out of scope of Aimy Speed Optimization for this particular one: (screenshots taken on October 14, 2015)
Desktop Results
Google and the Google Logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc. - used with permission.
Google and the Google Logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc. - used with permission.
Summary
All tested Joomla! websites could increase page speed from 12 to 36 points with just a few clicks.
Some further optimizations could be done afterwards. However, these would require manual analysis and could therefore not be done programmatically. For example, this might be an optimization of images or server response time.
Taking everything into account Aimy Speed Optimization provides a very fast and easy way to speed up your Joomla! website, increase page speed and do one step more towards a reasonable search engine optimization (SEO).
Curious? Have a look at your current page speed at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and consider optimizing it with Aimy Speed Optimization: