Drupal Website Checklist
Benefits of Testing â—? If you have developed a website using Drupal, you should test it for performance and stability. â—? This will allow you to extract maximum juice out of your Content Management System and ensure that it performs at its optimum best.
Steps for Testing
Caching ● Start by enabling block cache as the blocks which don't change among users can be cached and served ● Along with this also enable Drupal cache for anonymous users. However use this only if you aren’t using any other front-end cache tool
Content Cache â—? If your site sees a rare addition or modification of the content, you need to make use of this cache â—? This will help in expiring Views every time content is inserted or modified
Views Caching â—? It is surely the most use Views module as far as displaying content to the website is concerned. â—? To get the best out of this you need to cache the Views instances. This should be cached to ensure that a cached copy returns instead of having to rebuild the preview.
Install Frontend Cache â—? It is quite similar to Views and stores HTML response in memory â—? When the user request for the same page it is returned from the HTML memory instead of going all the way up to the web server and PHP
Modules Disable any unused and non-essential modules as they consume additional server resources and slow down your website. Unless required disable the Statistics module as it tends to write on the database for every visit and instead switch to Google Analytics.
Distributed Cache â—? By installing the distributed cache you would be able to cache tables of your database in memory or file â—? By default, Drupal creates and uses its own cache and stores it in database in tables. With distributed cache you will be able to store these caches in memory or file
Content Delivery Networks Make sure you are caching static content in the form of CSS, JS, fonts, files and images and also start using a Content Delivery Network. There are many options at hand including AWS Cloudfront, Akamai, or Cloudflare as they speed up the load time of your website substantially.
Optimize Images ● Oversized and heavy images often tend to hurt your site performance and you should reduce their size. ● There are several ways of doing it and these include ImageAPI Optimize module, opting, jpegmini, jpegoptim and many others. ● Also you can try converting some of the non-transparent jpg and png images into smaller sized jpg.
Speed Up DNS A typical DNS request takes anything between 50 ms to 200 ms as the user's’ browser contacts a DNS service to find the IP address. AWS Route 53, DNS Made Easy, Akamai, Dyn and Neustar UltraDNS are some of the tools that help you speed up DNS request and improve site performance.
Responsive â—? If you want your mobile users to save on their bandwidth by downloading smaller images use the Picture module. â—? This can significantly reduce the page load time for sites browsed using small screen devices.
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