*When discussing new online projects, the question of choosing the most suitable CMS often arises. To make the right choice, you need to take into account several important factors related to the project: initial requirements, project size, customization options, skill level of CMS administrators, interface, as well as other factors. If you have already chosen Drupal as a working CMS for your website, you may be interested in how powerful it is. So, let’s consider Drupal’s basic performance in detail.
Drupal Performance Optimization
The speed of the site directly affects both the conversion and the position in search results. It is well known that accelerating page load time by one second can increase conversions by 7%. However, the complete optimization requires a very serious approach and the involvement of specialists. They are looking for the bottlenecks of the site for several days and fix them. For example, you can improve your Drupal performance by approaching specialists from the https://gole.ms/services/optimizing-performance site.
However, there are many quick and easy techniques to help your website work faster. You don’t have to use all of them: just try several options and check how they affect the loading time of your site:
1) Enable Built-In Caching
Enabling caching seems obvious, but a lot of people don’t do that. This step transfers the entire page to the database cache table. It gives a significant boost in site performance. You can enable built-in caching in the admin by proceeding to Settings – Configuration – Performance.
2) Make HTML Files Static
Boost module turns all Drupal pages into static HTML files and stores them in a cache folder on the server disk. When a user visits a page, a server returns the cached page from the disk without using PHP and MySQL, which gives a huge speed boost. Boost works very well on small sites on shared hosting where Varnish is not installed.
3) Turn on the Fast 404 Module
The page loading speed can increase dramatically if your site has a lot of broken links to images and CSS files. Drupal will still try to load these links on every page where they are located, but they will return a 404 (page not found) error. Drupal will perform the entire page load cycle even if a 404 error appears, which leads to a very large waste of resources. The fast 404 module changes this situation by sending notifications when a 404 error occurs.
4) Limit the Number of Modules Used
Any enabled module will slow down page loading. Therefore, before installing a module, always ask yourself the question “Why do I need it at all? Is it possible to do without it?” In many cases, it is better to make your module that will do exactly what you need than to enable a large ready-made module, the functionality of which you will use only for 10%.
Finally, Drupal allows you to implement projects of different scales. Now you know the secrets of making your site work fast.
