45+ Ultimate Ways to Speed Up Your TYPO3 Performance

Are you searching for practical best-practices and tools-techniques to Speed up your TYPO3 Performance? Then, you are in the correct place!

In 2017, We wrote one of our most popular blog 30 Tips for Optimum TYPO3 Speed and, Here we are going to update and expand it with more TYPO3 tools & techniques with latest TYPO3 v9 and v10 standards.

Based on our one-decade of the TYPO3 development experience, we have tried to prepare a list of all feasible TYPO3 Performance optimization tools & techniques.

“This blog is dedicated to all hundreds of TYPO3 developers & agencies who are contributing their time & money to have better speed & performance of TYPO3 core and extensions - Heartily, Thanks a lot!”

It's a bit-long blog post, but don’t worry, there is not any theory, we have included practical solutions with examples, so take a cup of good-coffee and keep reading :)

Before we start, Did you know?

Interesting huh?

Checkout detailed report at HttpArchive.org

So, are you ready? Let’s go one-by-one to each TYPO3 extensions, tools, and techniques to Speed up TYPO3 Performance and TYPO3 Troubleshoot.

We recommend generating your TYPO3 site’s performance report from below popular online speed report generator tools.

• Google PageSpeed Insight
• Pingdom
• Webpage Test
• GTMetrix

• Step 1. Go to Web > Template > Select root-page
• Step 2. Edit Setup > Add following code > Click on Save button

Generally, your TYPO3 site may have more than 15+ CSS/JS files. Let's compress and concatenate them in a single file to avoid too many requests.

• Step 1. Go to Web > Template > Select root-page
• Step 2. Edit setup > Add following code > Click on Save button

Three friends developed and maintained a small but cool TYPO3 extension - EXT:sourceopt. It will compress your TYPO3 site’s HTML output to decrease the size of your page.

Do you love TYPO3 & Varnish? Varnish is the fastest, most flexible and cost-efficient web accelerator available for your online business. Andri Steiner developed robust Varnish TYPO3 Extension Varnish Connector.

TYPO3 Backend

TSConfig: TCEMAIN.clearCacheCmd

Usually used to automatically clear caches for configured pages, when editing records on another page in the backend (like news records in a sysfolder). Can be configured with all or pages to automatically clear all caches for every single page. Use this with care.

pages.no_cache

Before TYPO3 9, it was possible to disable the cache for a page record with the db field no_cache (Even for editors). This can heavily affect the CPU load and performance of the website and should be avoided.

Mount points

Mount points generally are a bad idea (duplicate content), but, if heavily used, can also lead to a lot of db load due to many recursions.

Extension Development

Caching Extbase Plugins

When configuring an Extbase plugin, you can specify the allowed Controller actions and which actions should not be cached at all. (this will internally create a USER_INT object in TYPO3)

Read more TYPO3 Caching Framework

Caching Framework

By default, many caching tables (like extbase_datamapfactory_datamap, extbase_reflection, cf_*, …) are stored in the default DB connection (usually MariaDB/MySQL) configured in TYPO3. In larger projects with fast growing cache tables, consider switching to a RedisBackend with reasonable amounts of memory assigned for Redis.

There are several other Caching Backends available (Typo3DatabaseBackend, MemcachedBackend, ApcBackend, and others as well as the possibility to implement your own).

Read TYPO3 Official Docs

$GLOBALS['TSFE']->set_no_cache()

Make sure, that your extensions are not using $GLOBALS['TSFE']->set_no_cache() everywhere, as this will completely disable the caching.

Extbase ORM vs Doctrine Querybuilder

The usage of Extbase repositories with its Object Relational Mapping and DDD design principles can be a very convenient and easy way to handle data objects, quickly create code and create a running project in a well-structured way. However, using an ORM, and its need to build all the data objects with all its complex relationships in the background, always means a performance tradeoff. If domain objects are not needed and performance critical data handling is required (like import/exports of large data sets), you should rather use the Doctrine Querybuilder for direct db access or the TYPO3 Core Engine.

TYPO3 Fluid Template

Compilable Viewhelpers

Make sure your custom Viewhelpers are using the CompilableInterface, if possible. This makes the Viewhelper static, avoids the instantiation of many instances of the viewhelper class (which can easily happen if it is placed inside a <f:for>-loop) and improves the performance of the template parsing.

cache.disable ViewHelper

Beware of the ViewHelper <f:cache.disable />. If used, it will disable the caching and compiling of the complete Fluid template (not just the single one where the Viewhelper is used) to PHP classes, slowing down the template building.

TypoScript Settings

config.linkVars

If linkVars are used (a classic example is the L parameter before TYPO3 9), you can and should limit the range of allowed values. Like: config.linkVars = L(0-3). These linkVars are automatically added to each link, if present in the current url, and can potentially flood the cache, if no range limit is present.

config.cache

This option determines the lifetime of a pages cache depending on configured db records and their start/stop time. This can for instance be useful on a news page: If a new news record is about to be shown, you will want the old page cache to automatically invalidate.

This will apply the cache option to the page with the id, which then takes the news records in the sysfolder with the id 11 in consideration for the cache lifetime.

Read more at TYPO3 Docs

config.cache_clearAtMidnight

With this setting set to 1, the cache will always expire at midnight.

config.cache_period

Amount of seconds until a page cache should be invalited. 604800 for instance would keep the page cache for a week.

config.sendCacheHeaders

If set to 1, TYPO3 will automatically send several cache headers (Last-Modified: x, Expires: x, ETag, Cache-Control, Pragma: public) for static pages to the browser. Only if the page is cached (No USER_INT objects) and no be_user or fe_user is logged in!

Typoscript Conditions

Each single TypoScript Condition means a new cache variant of the page (TYPO3 will create one cache for the page, if the condition is met and one if not). To avoid bloating up the cache, use such conditions with care and remove any unnecessary condition stubs in your TypoScript, that are not in use.

COA_INT / USER_INT

Try to limit your *_INT objects in TypoScript. These are basically uncached components in your website. When present, TYPO3 first creates a static (cached) version of the page and inserts placeholder comments in the html output that mark all locations, where a *_INT object is present. After that, each single of these objects is created from scratch (uncached). This considerably slows down page generation compared to a fully cached page.

Be especially careful, when using *_INT objects inside a FLUIDTEMPLATE. If you place such an object in the section page.10.variables, this would apply the uncached object for every single page, even if it is not actually used in the Fluid template, unnecessarily slowing down every single page in your frontend.

TYPO3 Install Tool

[FE][pageNotFoundOnCHashError]

If set to true and a page request in the frontend fails due to a cHash comparison fail (the calculated chash does not match the actual get parameters in the url), TYPO3 will trigger a 404 error. This is the recommended setting, as with false TYPO3 would show the page instead with no caching. You should rather fix your urls if cHash errors occur on the page.

[FE][disableNoCacheParameter]

If set to true, the infamous &no_cache=1 will do nothing at all, if present in any url (Check your code, that this change doesn't break anything).

Some servers have been configured with low PHP settings for TYPO3. Please consider having at least the following minimum PHP configuration into php.ini.

php.ini

Opcache

Check that Opcache is enabled in the phpinfo module. Some cheap hostings completely disable it and other Bytecode caches and require users to upgrade their hosting agreement to enable them.

PHP FPM

Consider switching to PHP FPM (either on Apache or nginx) to better handle large amounts of requests and for other performance improvements compared to the Apache mod_php module.

PHP Profiling

You can use a PHP profiler like xdebug or blackfire.io (paid service) to find performance bottlenecks in your PHP code.

Google PageSpeed highly recommends loading your Javascript at the end of the page to avoid JavaScript block rendering and increase first-byte rendering. Just make sure to include your JavaScript libraries with the following TypoScript way.

Set Crop feature into Fluid

We have developed a TYPO3 extension to apply the wonderful TYPO3 lazy-load concept of download images on-scroll to your TYPO3 site.

Once you have a huge site, it’s necessary to smartly clear the cache from the backend. For example, if you change a particular page or content-element, it should be clear the cache is clear of particular that. As to re-build the TYPO3 cache may take time.

Alexander Stehlik developed EXT:cacheopt to take care of such smart TYPO3 Cache Optimizer.

Google continuously promotes the Next-generation WebP project to faster loading of image assets on the web.

Wolfgang Klinger developed WebP TYPO3 Extension to automatically generate WebP for your existing JPG and PNG files. Just try it!

Yes, too many 301 redirects will cause an issue on your TYPO3 Performance. Because at each time TYPO3 (or apache server from .htaccess) will check each of your redirects URL before loading pages, so just try to keep a minimum 301 redirects.

Very basic, always set 404 error pages into TYPO3 to have quick load 404 pages once cause such an error occurs.

Yeah, If you are trying to run thousands of pages with search feature through EXT:indexed_search then it may cause TYPO3 Performance issues with caching and indexing.

Try to disable indexed_search extension, As an alternative try to install and configure TYPO3 solr.

More easy-way to minify, compress and concatenate your assets CSS and JavaScript from small TYPO3 extension Scriptmerger from Stefan Galinski

TYPO3 has a built-in backend and frontend compression technique within the core, Just configure following settings.

Is your TYPO3 backend page-tree too slow due to thousands of pages? TYPO3 Extension from bueroparallel, Performance-optimized backend page tree for large TYPO3 v9 installations (> 10k pages).

Once you make site-live at the Production server, then better to avoid TYPO3-logs to save such logs entries time.

If you are a TYPO3 integrator or developer, at the end of your extension development always try to TYPO3 code-review from your Senior TYPO3 developer.

In that way, You can clean-up unnecessary code as well as improve the quality of code to faster your TYPO3 site.

Yeah, sometimes your customer or non-technical people trial and error many TYPO3 extensions from TER.

It’s always best practice to deactivate or delete not-used TYPO3 extension for better TYPO3 Performance as well as secure your site.

We recommend to study defer and async, here is the good source

Check out how many server requests are calling for your particular TYPO3 page. Requests can be CSS, js, images, etc. from internal or external.

You should consider a minimum server request to reduce connecting time eg., If you have too many images then could use the concept of CSS or Image Sprites.

Google says, Your page should be less than 500 KB and would be great to load less than 3 seconds. Check out your total size with GTMetrix and do your best to reduce the all-over size of your TYPO3 page size.

Make sure to enable Gzip compression at your .htaccess.

Your assets should be store as much as long-time into your user’s browser, please add the following code into your .htaccess file.

Let’s disallow thieves by limiting a few domains which will only access your site. In this way, your server will get less-load.

From a server perspective, It’s good practice to set connection keep-alive, You can set the following code into your .htaccess file.

We suggest to set prefetch and pre-connect “rel” attribute at your <link> tag, You can Google to know the benefits ;)

Prefetch Google Fonts:

Prefetch Google Code (jQuery):

Prefetch Google Analytics:

Preconnect connect in advance!

One more thing, If your database is bit-bigger then you can help someone database server administrator to optimize your database-server level Optimization.

Sometime, you may realize your TYPO3 instance’s size is in GB. It’s recommended to remove such an unused cache or rebuild the cache.

You can easily remove such cache and re-generate the cache with following commands.

Especially deprecation logs should never be enabled on production systems, as they tend to grow very quickly. Even after fixing all the deprecation warnings in your own extensions, you will usually end up with lots of deprecation warnings from third-party extensions that you cannot simply fix (which often happen because these extensions need to support a wide variety of TYPO3 versions). You can disable the deprecation log in TYPO3 9 in your ext_localconf.php with the following code

Most people use MySQL database server for the TYPO3 installation. Try below optimization at your MySQL server to speed-up your TYPO3 Performance.

LIKE ‘%FOOBAR’

Please, for everything that is good, do not use a statment like LIKE ‘%FOOBAR’ in your sql queries. This will do a full db scan and not scale at all.

DB Indices

Optimize your MySQL/MariaDB indices, especially for tables that are expected to handle large amounts of data. The EXPLAIN statement can help with analyzing your queries as well as the Debug panel in the TYPO3 Adminpanel.

Database Server Setting

You can configure some of the following server-level (especially Apache) configuration.

Server Infrastructure

For larger projects with many visitors, it could be a good idea to invest in multiple servers with a Load Balancer. (Which also improves the uptime of the website)

Even after trying above 47 ways to speed up your TYPO3 Performance does not help to increase the performance of your TYPO3 site, then It’s time to think about choosing better hosting or upgrading your TYPO3 hosting.

E.g, If you are running on a shared TYPO3 server which is generally very-slow, then better to move on with a dedicated TYPO3 server.

Also, always try to get a server from TYPO3 specialized hosting guys eg., https://jweiland.net/ who prepare their server with best compatible with TYPO3 CMS.

There are variance factors like based on your site’s traffic and site’s size, you need to smartly choose hosting plans for better performance and of course cost-effective hosting solution.

Team T3Terminal proudly launched the world's first ready-to-live TYPO3 SaaS solution (how simple it is, Choose your TYPO3 Template and Go-live) TYPO3 SaaS solution with best server performance and cost-reliable solution. Know more at TYPO3 SaaS Solution

• We hope you enjoyed and learned good tips and tricks to Speed Up your TYPO3 Performance.
• As in above mentioned #49 ways to increase the performance of your TYPO3 instance, There are many ways to increase like Backend optimization, Server configuration, Frontend optimization, etc.,

Do you know any other special tools or techniques to improve performance of TYPO3 website? Keep helping the TYPO3 community by writing them to the comment box.