First, it’s great that you are looking to increasing your site performance and speed. Your websites speed is a crucial factor to your online success. A slow site is not going to take you, anywhere close to your website goals.
Many CMS (Content Management System) do a decent job in making your site, perform well. But, in most cases that’s not just enough. You need to take few more steps beyond that, to improve your site performance drastically.
Fortunately, Drupal helps you to do that lot better and lot easier. Here are some quick ways, by which you can extremely boost your Drupal sites overall performance and speed.
Now, before getting in to that,
If you are already, owning a Drupal site up and running, then you need to check, its current performance and page loading speed first. One of the best place to check that is by using Google’s PageSpeed Tools, its free and it will help you to analyze, and optimize your Drupal site’s speed and performance definitely.
Another great tool apart from Google’s PageSpeed Insights for checking your sites current speed and performance is Yslow, which is an addon plugin for Mozilla Firefox browser, which works along with the Firebug addon.
Once you identified, on what’s needed to be done to increase your sites performance, with those tools, you will be in a much better situation to address then, very effectively.
For a Drupal site, many of those issues can be addressed by enabling, page caching and setting Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript (JS) bandwidth optimization within your Drupal’s core installation.
To do that, Just log in to your Drupal Administrative area, and in the Drupal Dashboard, click the Configuration tab,
And scroll down and click the Development >> Performance section,
And check the Cache Pages and Cache Block Options.
You can set the time for Minimum cache life time and Expiration of cached pages as per your specific requirements. And then, check the Aggregate and compress CSS files and Aggregate JavaScript files option, to optimize your website efficiently.
And then Save the Configuration settings.
Next, try to optimize all your images in your Drupal site as much as possible. Optimizing images by Losslessly compressing it, can do great wonders for your, sites performance and page loading time. One good place to losslessly compress your images online is, Yahoo’s Smush it.
Apart from this, for a superior Drupal site performance, it is always recommended to use a good web hosting sever, which is rightly optimized especially for running Drupal sites. You can check with your web hosting provider for more on this.
And finally, if you are running a busy Drupal site or planning to start one big time, then using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Amazon CloudFront can help you in increasing your sites speed, very significantly.
