Drupal performance tuning tips - Running Drupal on shared hosting (GoDaddy / HostGator / Dreamhost etc)

Running Drupal on a shared hosting environment could become a challenge when the site starts getting a lot of visitors. So f you run your Drupal installation on one of the shared hosting providers like GoDaddy, Hostgator, Dreamhost etc and your site is reasonably popular then it is likely that you would have run into performance issues if the site is not configured correctly. If you configure your Drupal site correctly you should be able to stick with shared hosting for a longer period of time before moving on to dedicated hosting.

Here are some easy to make performance tips that could help you speed up your Drupal site while still on your shared hosting.

a) Configure Boost for handling anonymous traffic

If you have significant amounts of anonymous traffic setting up the boost module will help deliver your pages to anonymous users without bootstrapping Drupal at all.

b) Configure caching

Ensure that you have configured caching correctly, enabled block caching and have enabled CSS and JS aggregation.

c) Configure views caching

Make sure that you have configured views caching options correctly. The caching options should be set correctly based on the context of the view. If you don't do this right you will end up running after a lot of stale/irrelevant data issues on your site.

d) Set up a CDN

If you can afford to, go ahead and purchase a CDN account from a CDN provider like MaxCDN and set up your site to deliver static content via CDN. This not only takes the load of the delivery of your static content off your server but also speeds up page load times considerably.

These are some of the quick fix solutions for speeding up your Drupal site. There are lot of other ways of speeding up your site like removing unwanted modules, removing unwanted css, moving images to sprites etc but these would require much more efforts and would also require a strong understanding of your specific system and the way you have built your site.

If you need help with performance tuning your Drupal site get in touch with us. We will be happy to work with you to solve your performance issues for you.