If you're not familiar with what Drupal is, it's an open-source CMS, or a framework, which over 2% of websites use today. It can power up various websites for different purposes, may it be for personal blogs up to huge corporate e-commerce platforms!
But just like all websites, you need to make sure you’re using it correctly for the optimum user experience. One of the biggest factors to keep your website user-friendly is its quick-loading speed.
Without the speedy performance, you’ll end up with visitors who immediately exit or actively avoid your website! As a result, your SEO, products, as well as your business may end up falling.
How can you keep your Drupal website speedy and still retain its quality, though? Read on as I show you nine easy and effective tips on how.
How to Speed Up Your Drupal Website
Top-rated SEO Firms highly recommend that your website has the best design and speed for user-experience. This plays with your chances of staying on top of your game with SEO. To keep your Drupal website as quick-performing as you and your team are, follow these nine tips:
1. Always Run Drupal’s Latest Version
This is the first and most important tip to follow to ensure the top performance from Drupal! Make sure that you check if you have the latest version of Drupal installed already. If not, update immediately for better improvements in its performance and how you use it.
These updates help remove bugs that affect site performance, following the most recent version of the Framework. You can check and run all necessary and latest updates by going to Reports then selecting Available Updates.
2. Optimize Your Images, CSS, and JavaScript Files
Did you know that images can take up to 56% of the weight on your webpage? When you optimize your images, it can increase speed. Optimize your images better with the Image Toolkit in Drupal.
The same goes for your other files beyond media! That's where the Advanced CSS/JC module comes along, which compresses and aggregates your CSS and JavaScript files for fast load times.
3. Implement a Content Delivery Network
For those who use a CDN, or a Content Delivery Network, then you may notice Drupal’s load time instantly decreases. That’s why if you don’t use one yet, I recommend that you have a CDN set up already! This ensures that you deliver all your assets faster to visitors, reducing the latency.
Not only does it offer better speed on a Drupal website, but it offers more benefits in terms of your content and SEO.
4. Disable All Unnecessary Modules
Another issue with Drupal is that they have overhead attached modules and plugins, though all CMS platforms have it, too. That’s why it’s crucial to never use over 50 modules at a time, disabling those you won’t need.
Here are some modules you can disable, which don’t usually affect the website’s functionality:
- Field, Rules, and Views UI
- Administration Development Tools
- Module Filter
- Blog and Forum
- Taxonomy and Search
- Dashboard
- Help and Shortcut
- Color and Toolbar
- Update Manager
5. Take Care of Error 404
Drupal websites perform slowly due to many error 404s that may be found within your website. This wastes your server’s resources, which ends up affecting your entire website in the process. Besides this, Drupal has very expensive 404 errors, using between 60MB to 1GB of memory to deliver one!
You can try the Drupal Fast 404 module to display errors using only 1MB memory. Better yet, get rid fo errors like this with tools that identify any 404s.
6. Choose Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a module that can dramatically decrease a Drupal website’s load time. It does it by ensuring images load only when visible to browser windows. It’s extremely effective in improving speed times, to the point that more than 18,000 Drupal websites use it!
Besides this feature, you can also tweak a module called the Image Resize Filter, so you won’t need to scale it down with complicated CSS.
7. Select Reliable and Speedy Web Hosting
Always make sure that you have the best web host for your website, which is a major factor to your Drupal website. Don’t go for cheap shared hosting, which overcrowds servers and results in slower performance.
Instead, go for a slightly pricier yet quality VPS to gain complete control of all your site’s resources. That way, you know how your resources are being used and know what else to do to ensure your host and website perform seamlessly.
8. Reverse the Proxy Server
If you aren't familiar with this yet, it refers to placing another app that serves the cached copies of your webpages. It's also known as Reverse Proxy Caching or the HTTP Accelerator, utilizing fewer of the website's resources for a faster-loading webpage.
There are two modules you can use for your Drupal website when it comes to Reverse Proxy Caching: Varnish or Cache Expiration.
9. More Additional Tweaks to Try
Besides these tips, there are also other additional tips you can follow:
- Disable the database logging with the Syslog-ng module
- For databases that run slow, check out the DB Tuner module
- Switch off your PHP filter module speed
- Add client-side validation on web forms with jQuery as needed
- When selecting a Web host, choose Drupal-specific ones for speedier results
Wrapping It Up
Even reputable platforms like Drupal can have speed issues if you’re building it with a complicated or under-powered server. With the right knowledge and tips, you can enjoy a speedier website which benefits both your traffic and the visitors who check what you have to offer.
Hopefully, this article on how to speed up your Drupal website helped you find ways for better user experience. So start looking into these tips to implement for your website now!
Do you have any questions or want to share your tips to enhance a Drupal website? Then comment below! Your thoughts are much appreciated.