There are a number of things to consider when creating or maintaining Joomla! website. To remember all the important aspects making your site popular and convenient for users, and securing its flawless operation, we have compiled a Successful Joomla! Site Checklist. It’s a guide providing developers and site administrators with important steps to be completed when creating or maintaining Joomla! website (starting from security on out to SEO and Social Media). This Joomla! Site Checklist allows you not only remember all the important things but helps to do them successfully, giving references to useful resources.
Check the points to be taken into account when creating or maintaining your Joomla! website right now! Make your site successful!
How to use: Joomla! Site Check list consists of various sections devoted to development and site maintenance aspects (Security, Accessibility, Analytics, etc.). Each section has its own compulsory or optional steps with references to the detailed description and solutions. Check the points (mark the things you have already done), and the progress bar above will display your success in development and site maintenance. After all the compulsory steps will have been marked, the progress bar will be completed.
We understand that this list cannot cover all aspects of development and site maintenance. So, if you know some other great tools or best practices helping Joomla! developers to produce quality websites, please, tell us about them in comments below.
Broken links are bad both for user experience and SEO. Users can leave your site if they get stuck with a broken link. Use link checkers to find such links and remove them or redirect to correct pages.
W3C link checker
iWebTool Broken Link Checker
Your website will never look professional with spelling and grammar mistakes. Learn best practices to improve your writing.
Capitalization
Writing Style
Word Variations e.g. UK vs US
Imagine you have developed great responsive template that looks awesome in Safari, but what about those who use Firefox, Chrome or even IE? Have you tested on other OS platforms?
BrowserShots.org
Browserling.com
Spoon.net
You should make sure that all site users land to the same URL whether or not they use www or not. This can be achieved by 301 redirect.
Why use www?
.htaccess Redirect Generator
Think of those who do not use mouse to browse pages or use screen readerS. How comfortable will they feel on your website?
Common problems and solutions
IDI Web Accessibility Checker
Test using a screen reader
Is it easy to read information on your pages? Check your pages for color contrast.
Check color contrast online
Use special markup to add attributes to elements on the web page to create semantically defined sections.
Using WAI-ARIA Landmarks
Guide to WAI-ARIA
Practical examples
Add your site to uptime monitors to track whether your site is still alive.
Uptime robot
GotSiteMonitor.com
Add tracking code to learn your audience and try to understand how they communicate with the site to provide them better service.
Google Analytics
StatCounter
Clicky
Number of mobile users is growing each day, so make sure that your website is friendly enough for mobile devices.
W3C mobile checker
Viewport meta-tag and @viewport rule control layout on mobile browsers. Be sure to use them if you need predictabe behavior.
Don't Forget the Viewport Meta Tag
Make your website mobile friendly
Correct field type will result in correct behavior across platforms and devices. E.g. special characters on screen keyboard for email, or digit keyboard for phone number field.
Input type: Email, Url, Phone
Diving in to HTML5 forms
You do not need to own different types of devices to test your application. Use emulators instead.
Online media query tester
6 free mobile emulators
Opera Mobile Emulator
Google provides a number of rules to optimize your page load. And be sure they use it while ranking your website in search results.
Google Page Speed
There is also a number of parameters you may optimize with tool from Yahoo. Unlike Goole they have documentation that shows how score is calculated.
Yahoo's YSlow
Use the service to find out what can you fix in server response headers to optimize page load.
redbot.org
Both Google and Yahoo recommend to optimize your images. Use following tools to reduce image size without loosing quality.
SmushIt.com
PunyPNG.com
PNGGauntlet for Windows
Image Optim for Mac
Markup pages in ways recognized by major search providers to improve the display of search results.
Schema.org reference
Schema-Creator.org
Check what data is extracted from your pages.
W3C semantic extractor
Make sure you have the latest version of Joomla! If not, update it!
Download latest Joomla!
You may perform periodic checks to be sure that site is clean of malware.
Sucuri SiteCheck
When you develop or customize an extension be sure to protect your site from CSRF attacks.
Explanation and walkthrough
Create a new user, give it super admin permissions, then delete old super admin user for changing ID of the admin user. Since Joomla! 2.5.5 you may change admin name during installation.
Joomla! directions
Recover super admin password
Do not use easy-to-guess passwords. But make them simple to remember.
How to make mnemonic password
Generate mnemonic password
Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess and make sure RewriteEngine is set to "On".
Do not let automatic scanners find out that you use Joomla by hidding or protecting /administrator/ folder.
Protect a directory with .htaccess
kSecure plugin
JLSecure My Site plugin
To block most common attacks it is suggested to establish advanced security using .htaccess file.
Suggested master .htaccess file
.htaccess redirect generator
Check configuration.php file permissions. Set it to 644, or much better to 444.
If you still on Joomla 1.5.x, do not use the standard jos_ table prefix.
Do not promote that website is built on Joomla! and its version for security reasons.
Remove Joomla generator tag
If you go live with the site being established on development environment, a good idea would be to check /log and /tmp folders paths in "configuration.php"
You do not use them and do not update them. So they are potentially dangerous.
Vulnerable extensions list
Look in your website structure for staging/development files and delete them (.psd, .bak, IDE files, copies etc.)
Show search crawlers what content should be indexed and what should be removed from index.
robots.txt tutorial
Create robots.txt online
Meta data (title, description) should be unique for each page. Use text formatting tags (h1, h2, h3; ul, li, etc). Include keywords into texts – unique for each page if possible. Use images with unique names and fill in alt tags.
How to use HTML meta tags
HTML Formatting Tags
Alt attribute
Once your page is correctly marked up, Rich Snippets will be displayed in Google search results.
Online tester
Getting started
Add authorship
Check most important SEO criteria and calculate your grade for every page of website.
SenSEO for Firefox
Make use of 404 page by offering useful links and site structure.
A more useful 404
Nowadays favicon is widely used, so be sure to change default Joomla!/template icon to your own one.
Online generator
How to properly link a favicon
Understand favicons
Use SEF extension to get human-readable URLs instead of address line with parameters.
11 best practices for URLs
URL rewrite in Apache
Power up your site search with specialized services.
Google Custom Search
Consider ''Open Search''
Use browser/OS specific features to make your website look nice anywhere.
Safari on iOS
Internet Explorer on Windows
Windows 8 Tiles
Do you use other cool tools in Joomla! development and maintenance? Share your experience — we'll be glad to extend our checklist.
Raffaele Esposito è il titolare dello Studio di Ingegneria. Si è laureato in Ingegneria Elettronica indirizzo Informatica presso l’Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”. Si occupa di informatica da più di vent’anni e da circa dieci anni soprattutto di gestione e protezione dei dati personali, qualità del software e dei sistemi informatici per PA ed aziende. E' socio membro di Federprivacy.
E’ stato responsabile scientifico di Sphere Ricerca e Sviluppo s.r.l. e coordinatore del progetto di ricerca “Sphere – sistemi di supporto alle decisioni”.
Come ricercatore dell’Università del Sannio, presso RCOST, Research Centre on Software Technology, Dipartimento di Ingegneria, con assegno di ricerca, ha svolto attività di ricerca ed ha lavorato su importanti progetti in cui ha applicato le moderne tecnologie legate al web, ricercato e sperimentato nuove soluzioni tecnologiche e metodologiche insieme a partner di elevato spessore come Enea, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, CEFRIEL, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A, EDS Italia Software, ecc..
Particolare rilevanza rivestono gli studi e le applicazioni riguardanti la qualità del software, l’evoluzione dei processi e dei servizi delle pubbliche amministrazioni alla luce delle tecnologie legate al web e quelli relativi alla composizione dei web services.
Ha lavorato per il CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) presso cui ha partecipato alla realizzazione del prototipo di un calcolatore con architettura data-flow.
Presso Ansaldo Segnalamento Ferroviario, invece, ha svolto attività legate al software di controllo della Metropolitana senza conducente di Copenhagen, riguardanti Verifica e Validazione dei sistemi di controllo real-time, controllo della qualità del software, attività di testing.
Dal 2001 è iscritto all’Albo degli Ingegneri della provincia di Benevento e, con decreto dirigenziale n. 272 del 15 giugno 2007, è stato inserito come Consulente nell’Elenco di Soggetti Esperti della Regione Campania, per le aree:
RICERCA & TRASFERIMENTO TECNOLOGICO
INFORMATION and COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT)
E’ consulente informatico di importanti PA, enti, associazioni ed aziende.
Membro del Program Committee di varie conferenze internazionali dell’ambito informatico, come esperto del settore, è stato Membro dell’Editorial Advisory Review Board per:
-IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), IEEE Computer Society, USA;
-la casa editrice Idea Group Inc., Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA;
-International Journal of Communication Systems, Wiley InterScience, USA ;
-Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE A, Zhejiang University Press, co-published with Springer-Verlag GmbH;
-Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE C, Zhejiang University Press, co-published with Springer-Verlag GmbH.
E’ coautore di numerose pubblicazioni scientifiche tra articoli su riviste internazionali, conferenze e workshop internazionali, capitoli di libri, technical report. I suoi lavori sono stati citati in oltre duemila paper e pubblicazioni in tutto il mondo (fonte: Google Scholar).
Nel 2015, come riconoscimento dell’elevato impatto del suo lavoro sul mondo scientifico, l’ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation gli ha conferito il PREMIO INTERNAZIONALE “ACM SIGEVO GECCO Impact Award 2015“.
Attualmente si occupa di
E’ docente a contratto presso l’Università del Sannio per il corso di Informatica per le Applicazioni Economiche, componente della commissione d’esame di Programmazione 1, già docente a contratto presso l’Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II” per il corso di Sistemi di elaborazione delle informazioni.