Keeping pace with all the page ranking changes that Google has made keeps website owners up at night.

At Tri-County Web, I follow Google's suggestion as much as possible. Implementing everything thing they suggest is impossible without a full-time web team working on your site.

I've been working on the page load speed on the Tri-County Web site.

My goal is to apply the techniques I have implemented on my website to the other site I manage. Google and Bing use page speed in factoring in page rankings. So the fast a site loads theoretically it should rank higher.

If a page takes too long to load the searcher will just leave before it loads and on the next site. Whichever search site you use it will consider the page is served up to the searcher a not answering the searcher request and therefore think your page is relevant. Relevancy is one of the three most important items to consider when developing content.

It has not been confirmed or denied by any entity that fast-loading sites help with ranking. It does help with visitors, especially on mobile devices.

There is a new Google update planned in the not distant future that will take into consideration page speed so let's err on the side of caution and go for a fast-loading website.

As you can see from the image below I have pretty much accomplished my goal.

NOTE: The site layout has changed since this article was written but the results are the same.

Well, the time has come to restore a Joomla website. Lucky for me it was my site that needed to be restored.

"You're only as good as your last backup."

I was able to restore my site from a full backup I took over the weekend. It took less time than I thought it would and was easier also. After the restore the site was intact. I found the issue to be an un-updated extension. Which caused a problem with the administration side that was broken.

The application I used to recover my site was, AkeebaBackup, the same one I use on every maintenance plan. This extension has been around for 10 years and has a strong team of coders and support behind it. It is very comforting to know it works and is straightforward to execute.

Kudos to Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos and his team for producing the most important extension you can add to a Joomla website.

With that being said, I cannot stress the importance of regular backups and testing the backup to ensure a site can be recovered. There have been a few instances when I needed to restore a website but, knowing the backups are safely stored in the cloud and are readily accessible makes the process go smoothly.

My backup philosophy is to backup based on the frequency of updates. Since Joomla releases updates are fairly consistent I run a massive backup on all sites the day before to preserve a working site just in case.

So if you are one of the clients and have a maintenance plan your website is in good hands.

I will be explaining in more depth the 6 points of my maintenance strategy.

Joomla patching is the most critical maintenance process you can perform on your site.

Many of the patches include security fixes to prevent hackers from taking over your site and locking you out to bring your site down. If you do not keep with the patch releases you leave yourself open to a multitude of attacks. Also, included are bug fixes that cause an issue with some of the installations.

So, what can you do to protect yourself?

Well, the obvious is to apply the updates from Joomla and perform regular usable backups.

If you do not have a backup of your website you will most likely have to start from scratch and rebuild. Another scenario is your hosting provider will also shut your site down if they find your site vulnerable to attacks.

But not all website owners have the time nor ability to carry out the chores, you have a business to run. That's when a low-cost maintenance provider like myself can help you out.