The speed of the site directly influences both the conversion and the position of the site in Google and Yahoo! search. It is known that speeding up page load time by one second can increase conversions by 7%. This makes many look for a solution to optimize their online resources.
If you are looking for professionals who have experience in profiling slow-running Drupal sites, the gole.ms service will come in handy. Consider optimizing your servers, speeding up your Drupal site, and scaling your Drupal projects. In this article, you’ll learn how to optimize Drupal sites so that they regularly score 100/100 in Google PageSpeed Insights tests.
Stages of Drupal Website Optimization
Drupal site optimization consists of four stages. Let’s dive into each of them so that you have an idea of how it works and what’s required.
Stage 1. Site and Server Diagnostics
- Website and server performance analysis using the module;
- Analysis of server response headers and making recommendations for changing them;
- Monitoring the speed and availability of site pages for 3 days;
- Analysis of Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations and drawing up recommendations on the use of Drupal modules and website development;
- Compiling a report and recommendations to speed up the site and increase the Google PageSpeed Insights metric.
Stage 2. Server Optimization
The step is not performed for virtual hosting; it is carried out only on a dedicated or virtual server:
- Server monitoring to find problem areas of site performance;
- Checking web server software settings (Nginx, Apache, PHP-FPM). Setting up server-side compression of static content and static file caching headers in the browser;
- If necessary, installation of additional software – APC, Memcached, and setting up one site to work with Memcached;
- MySQL optimization;
- Recommendations for further optimization of the server and site.
Stage 3. Setting Up a Drupal Site to Speed Up Work
- Image compression and optimization of images, CSS, and JavaScript;
- Setting up Drupal caching;
- Profiling slow Drupal pages (xdebug). Analysis of slow and frequent database queries (MySQL slow log, Devel log). On virtual hosting, it is performed only if there is a technical possibility;
- Debugging Drupal to find out the cause of performance problems;
- Monitoring and configuring page caching;
- Making recommendations for further improvement of the site to eliminate performance problems.
Performing three stages of work allows you to significantly speed up the site and bring it into the green zone of the Google PageSpeed Insights test (85 or more points).
Stage 4. Website Development
To eliminate the causes of slow work or correct critical remarks of Google PageSpeed Insights, a significant improvement of the site may be required; for technical reasons, a hosting change may be needed to fully optimize the server. In these cases, specialists should recommend and set up suitable hosting, and make the necessary improvements to the Drupal site.
Conclusion
To perform site optimization work, it is highly recommended to pre-install all the latest Drupal modules and core updates. It is also a good idea to have a copy of the site for testing, SSH access on the site through the Drupal admin panel, run Drush and Composer, file version control in GIT. Such site optimization will pay you off well and should definitely be considered.
