Take Flight with Drupal
Slow websites give your visitors a bad user experience, and very slow websites cause the work you have done by spending labour / money / time to be completely rubbish.
After developing your Drupal-based website, one of the important things you should check before publishing it is its performance. Drupal provides an infrastructure that allows you to easily manage very high traffic websites, as long as you have configured it correctly.
A fast-running website will help you rank high in search engines, give your visitors a much better experience, help increase your conversion rates, and thus increase your sales and revenues through the website.
With Drupal, you can create extremely powerful and well-performing web applications. Below, we have listed some tips to improve the performance of your Drupal website and take it to flight;
Drupal has a very flexible and well working cache system, you can easily increase the speed of your website even with the cache system that comes directly with Drupal. Especially with Drupal 8, it has become much more successful in performance and caching. You can make your website run fast by adjusting the cache settings from the Drupal administration panel.
You can see the Drupal 8 Performance settings screen on the screen below. You can select a time interval for the cache. You can also enable compression of css and javasctipt files to load faster and use less traffic.
Apart from general cache settings, you can also make separate cache settings for views or blocks. We strongly recommend you to set cache settings for views that will cause your website to load slowly.
With the following modules developed by the Drupal community, you can give Drupal more competence in caching.
- Memcache: Memcache makes your Drupal website run faster by keeping the cache contents stored in the database in RAM. It shows the results directly to your visitors without the need for the server to connect and query the database each time.
Boost: If most of your traffic comes from unregistered users, you can use Boost. Boost creates a static copy of your website on the server and shows static content directly to your visitors without any database queries. It is a very useful method especially for shared hosting users.
Varnish: Varnish is a service that runs between the user and your web server. Pages are cached and transmitted to the user in a performant way. You can use Vanish if you have very high traffic. Although it provides high performance, it is a little more difficult to configure than the other two methods.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDNs, which stands for Content Delivery Network, ensure that static content such as images, css, javascript located on different servers around the world are loaded to users from the server closest to them. With CDN, static content is loaded much faster, and since the number of requests of the server where your website is hosted will also decrease, your website will run more efficiently.
Remove Unused Modules and Blocks
If you have unused modules and blocks, remove them. Even if you don't use these modules, each open module causes Drupal to run slower and consumes server resources unnecessarily.
Optimise Your Theme Files
One of Drupal's greatest strengths is that it provides developers with very detailed customisation possibilities. Remove unnecessary spaces, description lines and unnecessary indents in your Drupal theme files (.tpl or .twig). The files will have a smaller size and will load much faster.
Image Optimisation
Many good and high quality images are used in good looking websites. Large-sized images cause websites to load more slowly. You can optimise the images used in websites with 3rd party applications before uploading them, or you can adjust the quality of the uploaded images with the image toolkit that comes with the Drupal core. With the Drupal Image Optimize module, you can also optimise images with external services such as Yahoo! and SmushIt.
