Our clients indulged in Drupal website development often ask us “Why is my Drupal website slow? How do I speed up the performance of my Drupal website? What Drupal performance optimization techniques should I use? Which is the most cost-effective solution to those Drupal performance issues that are causing my Drupal site to run slow? Well, this blog post is going to answer all these questions related to Drupal performance optimization.
As a leading Drupal development company, we have been serving our global clientele with the best-in-class Drupal 8 development services. Over the years, we have gained vast experience and expertise in Drupal website development, and hence, we realize what Drupal performance issues could cause your Drupal website to give poor performance.
The most straightforward, cost-effective, and quickest solution to address these issues is Drupal Caching. And fortunately, Drupal 8 offers one of the most advanced caching systems. All you need to do is follow the Drupal caching best practices and make the most out of it.
How Does Caching Improve Drupal Site’s Performance?
After a user accesses a web page on your website, content elements, and web data from that particular page such as images, HTML, CSS, etc., are stored in an accessible location. When that user visits the same webpage the next time, your website provides the user with the cached version of the content. This leads to reduced bandwidth and faster page loads
If you’re new to Drupal website development, it is always wise to hire Drupal developers to get the job done.
Here’s a list of 10 best Drupal caching practices to optimize your Drupal site’s performance.
10 Best Drupal Caching Practices to Speed Up Page Load Time
Tip 1: Make Use of the Internal Page Cache Module to Cache Pages for Anonymous Users
Let’s say you have an ‘Add to Cart’ option for anonymous users on your eCommerce portal. You can use this module to precisely cache this functionality. This Drupal performance optimization technique will take you less than a minute to set up and optimize.
Tip 2: Choose the Right Tools for Heavy Traffic Drupal Sites
If you running a busy Drupal 8 website, you need to choose the best suited caching tools to improve your site’s loading speed.
Here are some of the powerful Drupal caching tools and optimization techniques that you can try:
- move to a Drupal-specialized hosting service provider like Acquia or Pantheon
- shift your database to its own VM/container in case you’re still running it locally, on your Drupal web server
- upgrade to PHP 7.1.0
- Enable OPcache via php.ini.
- Put a proxy (i.e. Nginx) in front of your server
Tip 3: Apply Block Caching Technique
This is the quickest and easiest Drupal performance optimization solution that can significantly increase Drupal 8 performance.
You simply need to cache those blocks that are not updated frequently like from one user to another.
Tip 4: Use Views Content Cache Module to Update Based on the Changes Made to the Content Changes
Views Content Cache module allows you to expire views caches every time you update or remove content on your website. This Drupal caching technique helps you to cache blocks that appear on thousands of pages, thereby optimizing your website for better performance.
Tip 5: Use a Reliable Content Delivery Network
This is the most powerful Drupal performance optimization solution for your Drupal website.
Here are the two strongest reasons why you should consider using a CDN to cache the static content including files, CSS, images, JavaScript, fonts, etc. on your website.
- Since your CDN has endpoints worldwide, you can keep the network delay to a minimum.
- You can speed up page loading time because your CDN has a domain different from your website’s, therefore, web browsers load content requests to your domain in parallel with the content delivered from your CDN.
Tip 6: Enable Varnish Cache (i.e. Front-End Cache)
This is another essential Drupal performance optimization technique that you can use to speed up page load time of your site. Varnish Cache can reduce the load on your server. How? It stores the HTML response, so the next time that particular page is requested, it serves it from memory. This results in bypassed PHP and web server which ultimately improves page load time.
Tip 7: Use the Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation Module to Boost the Front-End Performance of Your Drupal Site
Aggregating your assets together is the most straightforward and cost-effective way to resolve those Drupal performance issues on your site. Drupal’s AdvAgg module takes care of all the steps that you need to take to aggregate your CSS and JS files, right from file grouping to caching to compressing.
If things seems difficult to you, it is always better to approach a professional Drupal development company for their Drupal website development and support services. Drupal India is always ready to help you overcome any hurdle that comes your way to optimize your Drupal performance.
Tip 8: Install Memcache to Keep Your Database Load to a Minimum
You may be often struggling to reduce the database load by caching database objects in RAM.
Memcache is a great Drupal 8 performance optimization technique that helps you reduce that load on the database and speed up your page load time. It does it so by taking standard caches out of the database and by caching the results of resource-intensive database operations.
Tip 9: Enable the Entity Cache Module to Cache Entities
The Entity Cache module helps you cache entities. For better results, you may pair Entity Cache with the Entity Cache Loader Module.
Tip 10: Use Distributed Cache
Here’s another highly-effective Drupal performance optimization method to try. Once you’ve installed a distributed cache, it’ll store your database’s cache tables (Drupal’s “cache_” tables) either in file or memory.
Conclusion
So, these are some of the best Drupal caching practices that can significantly speed up your page loading time. If you’re not sure which technique to try first, you may hire Drupal developers who can handle all these caching settings.
Drupal India is here to help you out! As a professional and experienced Drupal development company, we can help you figure out which of these Drupal caching techniques are best-fit solutions for your website and the specific Drupal performance issues that it is facing. Just drop us a line, and we’ll get back to you shortly.
Read More:- How to Install Google Analytics in Drupal & How to Use It?
FAQs
Q.1. Which version of Drupal should I use?
If you’re running your website on Drupal 7 or Drupal 8, you should consider upgrading to Drupal 9 version as both the versions will not receive community support and security patches anymore. Drupal 7 users should first consider upgrading to Drupal 8 and then to Drupal 9, as it will ensure fast and smooth upgrade from D8 to D9.
Q.2. I need help with customization and feature enhancement. Can you help?
Yes, we can. As a top-notch Drupal development company in India, we are well-versed with Drupal CMS, and therefore, we can provide multiple Drupal theme options to customize your Drupal website base on your unique requirements. Just hire Drupal developers from us and see the magic!
Q.3. Can I migrate a WordPress site to Drupal?
Yes, you can do it. There are many Drupal modules like WordPress Migrate that allows for a smooth and seamless migration to Drupal. However, if you’re new to Drupal website development, it is wise to take a professional’s help.
