10 Tips to Speed Up Drupal Website Performance

A website's performance is a significant concern. However, optimizing your Google rankings isn't the only reason for faster website load rates. It involves improving the customer experience and boosting revenue. Drupal is an excellent website content management system when you need a website to be functional, safe, and fast. Because of its adaptability and customizability, Drupal is a perfect platform for creating a high-performing website. This post will look for ways to make your Drupal website faster. It is the best guide to help you speed up drupal website performance effectively. Here are the top 10 valuable tips for improving Drupal speed.

Ways to Speed Up Drupal Website Performance

Why should you worry about speeding up Drupal? Your website's speed significantly impacts traffic, conversions, revenue, and SEO rankings. A poorly configured Drupal website reduces response time, makes it vulnerable, and results in database delay. Optimized website performance ensures visitors have a smooth experience while navigating your website.

So, below are a few tips you can follow to improve your Drupal website performance and keep it running efficiently to ensure repeat visitors.

Keep Your Site Simple and the Modules Updated

The foremost step in increasing site speed is picking a simple and efficient design. Next, you can create a speedy website by minimizing the number of components on your page, like widgets and embedded media.

Some website admins ignore updating the modules or forget to do so. As a result, the website gets heavier over time. So, if you want Drupal websites to load faster, you should update every module.

Uninstall any Unnecessary Modules

Each module on your site has overhead and an execution time for the code. The code execution takes longer if more modules are installed on the website. The website's page load time is directly associated with this execution time.

Sometimes admins make the mistake of deactivating modules rather than doing a complete uninstall. This adds to the page load time. Therefore, you should consider uninstalling all unneeded modules from the website to reduce its execution time. Thus, completely uninstalling all unnecessary modules is a meaningful way to speed up Drupal website performance.

Utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

You could use a few third-party solutions with Drupal to make your website load faster. Content delivery networks are essential for reducing page load times. Your website is kept on servers across the world by a CDN. Every continent and every region is host to data centers owned by CDN companies. Various Drupal website components, including CSS, Javascript, and media, are provided by CDNs, which serve them to visitors from the closest location. Due to the speedy delivery of web page components, this significantly decreases the page load time.

Image Styles and Optimization 

Images are the engaging elements on any website that create a great appearance. However, they can also weigh the most on your page. Due to their large size, they are also amongst the aspects that load the slowest. Fortunately, Drupal provides basic functionality to reduce load times by optimizing the size of the images for various screen sizes. Additionally, owing to this feature, the website will automatically display well on screens of all sizes.

The Image Optimization feature controls the compression ratio of images to keep their quality close to the original, which is another beneficial feature included in Drupal 8's core. In addition, it further optimizes the speed of the page load.

Improve the Cache

Optimizing the cache system is one of the best ways to speed up Drupal websites. This technique ensures that all web page elements are saved in an easily accessible location following a user's initial visit. Then, the webpage elements are retrieved from the cache when the visitor reaccesses the website. The website's loading speed improves significantly as a result.

In addition to the basic cache system, two other cache modules are part of Drupal core. The internal cache module serves anonymous users by caching the page upon the initial visit, which speeds up the load time process for all subsequent visitors. With Drupal 8, the internal dynamic page cache module was introduced, making the website faster for both logged-in and anonymous users.

Aggregation of CSS/JS

Optimizing the bandwidth of your Drupal site can be accomplished by grouping CSS and JS files. Aggregation is the process of loading CSS and JS simultaneously. It also goes by the name of bandwidth optimization. Minimizing bandwidth has been shown to decrease loading times significantly. Therefore, the performance and download speeds of your Drupal 9 front end can be accelerated using this kind of optimization.

Activate Boost

All Drupal pages are converted by Boost into flat HTML files and kept in a cache folder. There is no PHP or MySQL processing when a user visits the page; instead, the server returns the cached file from the disc. The speed of the web pages is greatly affected by this. Therefore, Boost is beneficial for smaller websites on shared hosting when Varnish (which caches pages to memory rather than the file system and is considerably faster) is not an option. Users logged in will still see standard Drupal pages even though Boost is enabled for anonymous users.

Turn off PHP Filter

You can utilize a PHP text format by using the PHP Filter module. In other words, PHP can be stored in the database and run when the page loads. It is never a good idea and poses performance and security risks. The only place for code should be modules, not the database. Turn off the PHP Filter module to get rid of it. But since it's a core module, don't remove the module itself.

Activate Fast 404 Module

Page performance will be significantly slower if your website contains corrupted CSS file paths or broken images. Because every time these paths are included in a page, Drupal will still try to load them, but it will return a 404 error (page not found). When serving a 404, Drupal performs a full bootstrap, which uses many resources. By sending fast 404 error messages, the Fast 404 module modifies how 404 errors are handled and improves page performance.

Redis and Varnish

Redis is an effective caching system for Drupal websites' static pages. It is a well-known open-source software essential to the acceleration of Drupal websites. The core features of Redis are derived from its data structure servers.

Varnish is an additional caching software used to speed up Drupal websites in addition to Redis. It is an HTTP accelerator that may be used alone or in conjunction with Redis to speed up the Drupal website.

Conclusion

The above tips are utilized to speed up Drupal website performance and are suitable for both beginners and experts. We suggest reading our other blog posts about drupal website development services. Implementing such tips will significantly decrease the time it takes for your website to load.

Innoraft is here to help you out! If you want our Drupal experts to create a plan and put best practices into place to improve your Drupal website performance, get in touch with us.