Best Practices to Speed up Your Drupal Site

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Among the millions of website owners who use Drupal platform for their online presence, there is a massive group of people who desire to speed up Drupal sites. Although Drupal is regarded as one of the most performance-oriented CMSs, tons of website owners are not satisfied with its offered speed. If your site runs on Drupal, you probably might be looking for some effective measures to improve your site’s speed.

In below, we will discuss the steps to speed up Drupal so that every site running on this CMS can offer a remarkable online experience to its visitors.

Methods toSpeed Up Drupal Sites Efficiently

Listed here are the most effective methods to speed up Drupal sites. You can learn and execute these methods to improve the speed of your Drupal CMS.

First, Find a Good Drupal Hosting

It’s useless if your web hosting service cannot support Drupal well, so you need to find a reliable and fast web server with good features to support Drupal. You could choose a general web hosting package, or you can consider a managed Drupal hosting which is optimized for Drupal hosting.

In case a shared hosting could not support your Drupal websites well, a good option is to upgrade to VPS hosting.

Choosing Modules Efficiently

Speed Up Drupal - Choose Good ModulesBeing a leading content management system, there are tremendous numbers of modules for Drupal in the market. Although every module may seem to be useful at first, you must carry out a brief research and analysis before installing one on your Drupal site. This is important because installing too many modules affects your site performance by reducing its loading speed.

For this reason, before installing any module, you should check its offerings and ascertain whether it is required for your website improvement. If a module is not pretty suitable for your Drupal site, you should avoid it from your installation list.

Configuring the Drupal Sites

As Drupal is a performance-oriented CMS, it offers various methods by which you can improve the speed of your site efficiently. In fact, there are many things in Drupal that you need to configure appropriately. To start with, you should make sure that all the cache boxes are marked. Apart from it, when the desired data is available in a cache, you can use the file efficiently to create smaller page and faster loading speed.

Memcache

Speed Up Drupal - MemcacheIf your website runs on the recently-developed versions of Drupal, you can improve the speed of your site by using the Memcache caching system. It is a versatile module that allows every module to make cache tables and use a particular API for writing to the tables. The primary advantage of using Memcache is the memory storage option. To be accurate, the Memcache module reduces the load on your server and increases speed of your Drupal site because of its memory.

Boost

Many times, a website slows down because of the cache present on it. Boost is an efficient module that removes the cache from your site for enhancing its speed. Whether it is a flat file or a page, this tool can cache all the pages so that the data can be loaded relatively quicker when it is requested in the future.  It is a recommendable tool for shared hosting service as the reads and writes can be done at a remarkable speed.

Using CDN

Known as the Content Delivery Network, CDN improves the speed of your Drupal site by creating a cache of the static content such as images, audio, CSS, and videos. Unlike most of the competitive modules, the CDN creates an external cache and saves it on several reliable servers in different parts of the world. By doing so, the risk of loss is minimum, and the optimization of images is at the optimum level.

Optimization of Images

Speed Up Drupal - Optimize ImagesIf your Drupal site contains a couple of pictures in every post, you might notice that the site loading speed is declining. This happens when you do not optimize the images for the SERP properly. In order to optimize images, you should use the most appropriate size of pictures. Using excessively large files is directly proportional to greater loading speed.

However, if you are not quite sure of image optimization, you can install a dedicated module, like Image Optimize, for optimizing the images present in your posts.

Monitoring the Performance

There are many features in the Drupal site through which you can keep a track of your site performance. These features provide you with the information about your site and areas that require improvements.

However, if you are not quite sure of executing the manual procedure, you can opt for a third-party service. Tools such as New Relic improve your site performance because it checks the areas that need improvements.

Updating the Platform

For providing remarkable features and services consistently, Drupal comes up with a periodical update. Many times, the updates involve some performance-oriented features such as speed booster and cache cleaner. Hence, you should always keep a track of Drupal updates.

In addition, you must update your platform as soon as a new version is launched. However, to avoid any problems, you should test an update before installing it on your site. Checking the update allows you to know the modifications in features; whether any offering has changed or improved.