Back to top

Enhancing Website Performance with Drupal

With the constant evolution of digital technologies and user expectations, website performance is paramount in ensuring optimal user experience. In today’s demanding digital world, it is crucial that your website loads immediately (between 0-1,5 seconds). If a page loads for more than 3 seconds, visitors will abandon such a site and never come back again.

In this blog post, Drupfan specialists explain what website performance is, why it is crucial for SEO campaigns, and how to increase page loading speed on the Drupal website.

What is Website Performance?

 

Website performance means speed, efficiency, and responsiveness of website page loading and operation. Site performance includes various metrics, including but not limited to page loading speed, media loading speed, overall site capacity for handling requests, and user traffic. Numerous factors affect website performance, such as image size and format, server capacity, bandwidth, and more. A well-optimized site ensures that users do not experience any difficulty with content loading and gain a seamless experience from the interaction with the platform. A high level of website performance is a guarantee of an increased level of user satisfaction, higher retention rates, and, as a result, increased conversion.

How Does Website Performance Affect SERP?

 

Although enhancing Drupal website loading speed is not only about your Google rankings, performance is still influencing the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) significantly. For a successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign, performance optimization is a must. Slow performance kills conversions.

A conceptual illustration for an article about enhancing website performance using Drupal.

Here, the team at Drupfan outlines the key performance points that affect SEO:

Mobile performance

Mobile performance is measured by Google and other search engines when ranking a website. In 2024, mobile performance is even more important than the desktop loading speed, as more and more users access the net via mobile devices.

Image optimization

Optimized images help the website load faster. What’s more, image optimization is another search ranking factor. Use Drupal modules for image compression, content delivery networks (CDNs), or image lazy loading to optimize pictures on your platform.

Hosting server settings

Poor configurations of the hosting provider server reduce website performance and affect search engine optimization in a bad way. Drupfan experts suggest investing a bit more in hosting services. Advanced server services will definitely save your budget in the long run due to the following reasons: higher loading speed, increased SEO rankings, enhanced security, and top-notch customer support.

How to Increase Drupal Website Performance?

 

Drupal is a highly customizable and flexible content management system that became a top choice for many global enterprises and small businesses across the globe thanks to Drupal’s high level of security and advanced performance. Unfortunately,  just like any other CMS or framework, Drupal's performance can sometimes become poor if not fine-tuned over the course of time. As we have already mentioned, such factors as the choice of hosting provider, content & media optimization, and the number of modules can become a root for slow load time.

Let’s see how you can increase website loading speed within Drupal.

  1. Keep Drupal up-to-date

First and foremost, it is crucial to keep Drupal CMS updated. Updates are meant to enhance security, fix existing vulnerabilities & bugs, and offer new features & functionality. Besides, older Drupal versions are no longer supported by the Drupal community or will not be supported in the near future.

Read our recent blog post about the future of Drupal and discover how to prepare for the Drupal 11 update.

  1. Enable caching

Utilizing caching on the Drupal website, you can significantly reduce the loading speed of returning visitors to your site. Upon subsequent visits, a user's browser will retrieve some content from the browser without sending additional HTTP requests to the server. Redis and Varnish might be helpful tools in caching optimization. While Redis focuses on backend caching for the reduction of database load, Varnish aims at caching frontend content for faster content delivery.

  1. Clean your code

Avoid code duplicates, as they might send additional unnecessary requests to the server.

  1. Eliminate render-blocking resources

Render-blocking resources are pieces of code usually located in CSS or JS that prevent a web page from fast loading, as the browser requires a relatively long time for their processing. Run a test in PageSpeed Insights to determine render-blocking scripts on your site.

  1. Avoid multiple redirects

Redirects increase loading time. Remove all unnecessary redirects and replace them with direct links.

A few more points to consider:

  • Always update Drupal modules & themes.
  • Uninstall unused Drupal modules.
  • Move to a better hosting provider.
  • Reduce JS (JavaScript) execution time.
  • Reload key requests.

Drupal Modules for Performance Optimization

 

Check the list of top Drupal 10 modules for performance optimization:

  • CDN module provides seamless Content Delivery Network integration. This tool helps to change file URLs so that files are downloaded from a CDN rather than your web server.
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) module converts Drupal pages into AMP-compliant pages with static content.
  • Image Optimize is a powerful module that helps reduce the size of the loaded image to 10-30 KB without loss in quality.

Website Performance Testing Tools

 

Take a look at the list of the most popular website performance testing tools and check if your Drupal website page losing speed:

Along with performance metrics, these tools provide valuable insights and advice on how to enhance loading speed in your particular case.

 

Time to Speed Up Drupal Website Performance

Of course, the points mentioned above are only a small part of a long and complicated website performance optimization process. Sometimes it might be difficult to determine the cause of poor page loading speed. You can rely on Drupfan web experts in terms of Drupal performance optimization. Contact us today to build cutting-edge digital experiences together!