Top 5 Tips To Accelerate Your Drupal Site Performance
Drupal is an incredible website content management system, especially when it comes to Drupal Performance. And when you build a high-performing website, everyone wins. Your customers enjoy the advantage of a responsive site that loads quickly. Your developers and engineers can focus on building and deploying new features rather than troubleshooting performance issues. And your business as a whole benefit from a site that drives higher ROI and costs less to host.
Drupal’s flexibility and potential for customization make it an excellent foundation for building a high-performing website. Of course, you need to take steps to ensure that you’re getting the best performance possible from your Drupal site. There’s plenty to address, from hosting to caching and beyond, and this guide is your starting point.
Follow these top 5 easy-to-implement tips and tricks for achieving this objective of a fantastic Drupal site.
Let’s start!
Optimize Drupal Performance: 5 Essential Tips
1. Keep Your Site and Modules Updated
Many website administrators ignore or forget to update the modules on the website. Over time, these outdated modules weigh down the website. The result is a very sluggish website that loads slowly in all browsers. Speed is an important reason behind the periodic rollout of module updates. Thus, the first thing you should do to speed up Drupal websites is to update every module.
2. Drupal Cache
To optimize site performance, you can use Drupal’s cache system to configure caching for the entire platform: Block, Views, Page, static and dynamic content, database and more. But doing it correctly is essential; otherwise, changes may not consistently appear. Devel module or Drush can flush the cache from the system, or advanced caching like Memcache or Varnish must be effectively tuned and managed.
3. Choosing Fast Web Hosting
When trying to improve the performance of the Drupal site, choose an excellent hosting service. It is a tip to speed up your Drupal performance. Please stay away from cheap hosting providers as they provide shared resources causing your site to get slow. Going with VPS like Digital Ocean, Linode, or Vultr is the best choice of web hosting.
4. Minimalist Design
One of the best ways to make any site faster is to take a minimalist approach. It is when you keep everything to strict necessity. The trade-off in this strategy is that your site will be without many of the bells and whistles you may want to add.
There is so much you can add to Drupal; it can be challenging to slim it down. However, everything from engaging modules to alluring themes can affect the performance of the website.
By sticking with fewer graphics and calls to the database, the site can deliver a much faster experience to the visitor.
5. Aggregate CSS and JavaScript Files
A quick way to optimize the amount of bandwidth your website uses is to aggregate JavaScript and CSS files. By default, Drupal lists each JavaScript and CSS file separately, which results in an excessive number of HTML requests having to be made when loading a web page. It can significantly affect site speed.
However, the built-in bandwidth optimization function Drupal has enabled you to aggregate both JavaScript and CSS files. When this feature is enabled, files will be minified and combined into functional groups. It should then reduce the size and number of requests made to your site, curtailing bandwidth usage and improving page load times.
If you want more advanced functionality than what’s included with Drupal core, then you can install the module Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation. This module will enable you to minify further, reduce the number of CSS and JavaScript files, and use Gzip to compress files during transfer between browser and server. Combined, these features will ultimately result in faster load times for your web pages.
Final Statement
With changing requirements and a rising number of users having varying bandwidths and connectivity options, Drupal provides specific functions and modules to scale up performance.
The five tips mentioned above are helpful in Speed Up Drupal Performance. Only you have to know where to look.
Do you have any other way or tip that you are using to speed up Drupal that we are missing here? We would love to hear them. Comment on them and let us know other Tips to Speed Up Drupal Performance that you are using.