Having moved from a seperate Wordpress blog and HTML/CSS portfolio site to a single Joomla website fairly recently, here is a collection of extensions that I have found most useful so far. Some are free, some are commercial and others have both free and commercial versions.

If your hosting server supports it, turning on GZIP page compression can save large amounts of bandwidth by compressing HTML before sending it out. An added bonus is that with pages being smaller they will load more quickly.

Here's a quick guide to enabling the feature in Joomla! 1.5

In no particular order and not just for Joomla sites. A list of tools that make running a website that little bit easier - from detailed statistics on site visitors to a seeing how your site is rendered across platforms/browsers.

If you have caching disabled, turning it on can increase your site's performance by keeping a copy of its content on the server and accessing this rather than querying the database. By default, caching is turned off. Here's how to enable it.