{"id":123,"date":"2014-06-05T19:26:58","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T19:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/?p=123"},"modified":"2025-10-20T10:18:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T10:18:13","slug":"six-tips-for-optimizing-your-drupal-installation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/six-tips-for-optimizing-your-drupal-installation\/","title":{"rendered":"Six Tips For Optimizing Your Drupal Installation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Drupal is an incredibly powerful content management system, with a high degree of flexibility and customizability. At the same time, it tends to be a touch more resource-intensive than other content management systems \u00a0\u2014 it\u2019s a bit of a memory hog. If a Drupal installation isn\u2019t properly optimized, it could very easily run into a whole host of performance problems as a website grows.<\/p>\n<p>It goes without saying that this is something you want to avoid if at all possible. \u00a0After all, a sluggish website makes for a poor user experience, a poor user experience makes for lower search rankings, and lower search rankings make for lower traffic. Not really a cycle any webmaster wants to find their site in, is it?<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Thankfully, by implementing the proper tweaks, you can prevent this from happening. Here are just a few of the best tactics for optimizing your Drupal installation\u2019s performance (courtesy of Cloud Reviews).<\/p>\n<h2><b>Utilize Drupal\u2019s Cache<\/b><\/h2>\n<p>The most basic step you can take to increase Drupal\u2019s performance is to look under the Performance tab of your Drupal configuration. Once there, simply enable the cache, and Drupal will begin storing database queries, leading to faster load-times for your visitors. If you want to take things a step further, you might also consider setting your cache up so that entries have a minimum life-span.<\/p>\n<h2><b>Optimize Images<\/b><\/h2>\n<p>One of the first things I learned about website optimization \u2013 and this is something that isn\u2019t tied exclusively to Drupal \u2013 is that you should never leave image resizing to the browser. Even though users are seeing the resized image, the browser still has to download the unoptimized version. Depending on how image-intensive your website is, that can amount to a huge volume of unnecessary data \u00a0and a significant increase in page load times.<\/p>\n<p>Resize and compress your images prior to uploading them (or at the very least, use some sort of optimization code like <a href=\"https:\/\/drupal.org\/project\/image_resize_filter\">Image Resize Filter<\/a>).<\/p>\n<h2><b>Install The BOOST Module(Or Varnish) <\/b><\/h2>\n<p>BOOST is very likely one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal as far as performance optimization is concerned. This application provides static page caching for Drupal, providing a huge boost to performance and scalability for most websites \u2013 particularly those on shared hosting plans.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re using Drupal on a dedicated server, <a href=\"https:\/\/drupal.org\/project\/varnish\">Varnish<\/a> might be a better choice.<\/p>\n<p>Do note that in both cases, you\u2019re going to have to perform a little bit of technical wizardry to get the module working. The resulting performance boost is well worth the effort though \u2013 there\u2019s a reason these two modules are so highly-praised within the Drupal community.<\/p>\n<h2><b>Make Use Of Mongo<\/b><\/h2>\n<p>If you\u2019ve got an expert programmer on-board (or you fancy yourself as one), you might consider implementing <a href=\"https:\/\/drupal.org\/project\/mongodb\">MongoDB<\/a> into your Drupal installation. This powerful NoSQL database can easily send the performance of a Drupal-run website through the roof. Of course, as I\u2019ve already said, this isn\u2019t an optimization for the faint of heart \u2013 you\u2019re going to need an expert on board to get this properly implemented without inadvertently destroying your site.<\/p>\n<h2><b>Benchmark Your Server<\/b><\/h2>\n<p>If you aren\u2019t quite certain where to start with the optimization process, consider checking out <a href=\"https:\/\/drupal.org\/profiling\">one of the many profiling resources<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/jmeter.apache.org\/\">available online<\/a>. \u00a0These benchmarking tools are designed to track down performance bottlenecks in your installation \u2013 they can help you if you\u2019re stumped as to how you can improve your performance.<\/p>\n<h2><b>Consider A Content Delivery Network<\/b><\/h2>\n<p>Last but certainly not least, if you\u2019re running a larger organization, a content delivery network might be worth your time. This will allow you to both expand the reach of your website and improve its performance \u2013 basically, you\u2019ll be able to kill two birds with one stone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Drupal is an incredibly powerful content management system, with a high degree of flexibility and customizability. At the same time, it tends to be a touch more resource-intensive than other content management systems \u00a0\u2014 it\u2019s a bit of a memory hog. If a Drupal installation isn\u2019t properly optimized, it could very easily run into a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-drupal"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions\/270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahosting.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}