How to Increase Drupal Site Speed
Google is making some buzz in the SEO circles with their new “Caffeine” project performing well in beta and set to hit the inter-waves early next year. Caffeine will introduce fresh algorithms that switch up the equation of ranking. Although, I do not know what the spiders’ new favorite meals will be, I do know that one factor in your ranking will be how quickly a web pages load on your site.
If you are running a Drupal site, hopefully you have sped it up using all the built-in Drupal options. But that may not be enough for Caffeine’s standards, so you will need to solve that problem. Here are five additional things you can do to accelerate your Drupal-clean site speed from running to sprinting.
1. Add
First, you should look into additional Drupal modules that offer additional options for caching like Advanced cache, ApacheBench, Authenticated User Page Caching (Authcache), Block Cache Alter, Boost, Cache browser, Cache Router, JavaScript Aggregator, and Memcache.
2. Switch
If you are using a hosting company, ask to move to a faster server or switch hosting companies.
3. Upgrade
If you upgrade your server and/or your bandwidth, your website will run much quicker.
4. Spread Out
Deploy Drupal to multiple servers to allow for better performance.
5. Utilize
Use PHP-level caching systems like Zend Platform.
Google’s Caffeine is coming and you want your Drupal site to be ready. While you are optimizing your Drupal site to look clean, don’t forget to make sure it can load fast as well. For more speed help, go to www.Drupal.org for dozens of pages dealing with all kinds of performance enhancements with Drupal.
My websites, GeorgetownCustomHomes.com and MarsHillRealty.com, have dominated the front page of the major search engines due to Volacci's efforts.
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About the author
Ben Finklea
Ben and the Volacci® team provide Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, and Conversions Consulting to a varied client base - ranging from local real estate agents to Fortune 500 companies. Ben's book Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization was released in September, 2009 and is available from Amazon.com.
Comments
Consider Pressflow
Since the Google bot is an anonymous user as far as Drupal is concerned, you'll want to focus on accelerating anonymous traffic for Caffeine Luckily, Drupal does a pretty good job with that already, but in my experience the best way to achieve significant gains is that is to switch to the Pressflow distribution of Drupal.
We recently tried it on one of our smaller projects (Taxi and it made a dramatic difference for anonymous users - the difference was clearly visible between stock Drupal and basic Pressflow. And Pressflow has built in support for some more advanced optimization methods as well.
-Daniel
Kerb
It should be noted that just
It should be noted that just throwing performance things at your website will probably not actually improve performance. You could install half of those cache modules before you found the one that works for your site. Just buying new hardware has an equally low chance of decreasing page load times. You can't fix a problem if you don't know the cause.
Also apachebench, cache browser, and more bandwidth are the three things on this list that most definitely won't decrease page load times.
Great points
Great points. Thanks, dalin! I was pretty much throwing the kitchen sink at this to get the ideas rolling. Yes, clearly, one should try to fix the problem, not just try anything. There was a great session about this very thing at Drupalcamp Austin. I'll post the link as soon as the video is up.