How to Optimize Drupal For Better Performance?

Up to now, we have received more than 100 emails from our readers asking us to find some Drupal speed optimization tips for them. To provide them with the best methods to optimize their Drupal sites, we have browsed a lot of information on the web and asked for suggestions from many experienced experts.

According to the information we collected, we found there are a pile of ways to optimize Drupal site speed and have worked out this comprehensive tutorial to list several of the best methods in below. Now, move on to learn the detailed steps to optimize your site speed.

Choose a Fast Drupal Hosting

One of the easiest ways to make Drupal sites run fast is to choose a fast Drupal hosting company that utilizes first-rate data centers, high performance servers and many cutting-edge technologies. Having more than 10 years’ of hosting experience, we have reviewed 100+ companies. As a result, we found the best Drupal hosting providers, among which InMotion and A2Hositng are highly recommended by offering free SSD. In addition, the former one has developed their own Max Speed Zone technology to speed up customers’ sites.

Utilize CDN

Besides choosing a fast web host, utilizing CDN is one of the best methods to optimize Drupal site speed. When choosing a CDN service, you need to take the international reach, solid statistics and many other elements into account. There are many reliable CDN providers meeting certain criteria, including Max CDN, CloudFlare CDN and much more, both of which are voted as one of the top 5 CDN providers. If you want to save money, you can choose a web host offering free CloudFlare like BlueHost that has been awarded as one of the best CloudFlare CDN web hosting companies.

Enable Caching

Another way to optimize Drupal sites is enabling caching by simply using the default caching option in the CMS. In addition, you are allowed to use many other useful and outstanding modules, especially the ones that work very well for caching for all kinds of readers. In this way, your sites can run much faster than ever before. Among the numerous Drupal cache modules, Boost and Memcached are 2 of the most recommended items.

Optimize Images

It takes much time to load the images with large sizes and much data, so you need to optimize images on your sites to make them run faster. There are 2 ways to optimize images easily, the first one is to control the number of images. According to our real hosting experience and many professional webmasters’ advice, you would better not to insert over 5 images in a post. The second method is to re-size large images and upload smaller image files that load quickly.

Optimize Database

Optimizing database affects the speed of Drupal sites. The best and easiest method to do this is install Database Maintenance module. To install this module, you need to go to Site Configuration > DB Maintenance and select how often you want to optimize the tables you plan to optimize. After this, click on Optimize Now to optimize tables instantly or click Save Configuration to run optimize on the time you choose.

Disable Unused Modules

Installing useful modules helps speed up Drupal sites. However, the unused modules affect the how fast sites load. Therefore, you need to disable the modules that you won’t use by going to the modules section in the admin. Besides this, you are also able to uninstall them. Using this method, you need to know that the tables the disabled modules use are also removed, so the database data made using the uninstalled modules can’t be recovered any more.

Remove Needless Content

Another useful method is to remove all content you don’t need. The needless content fills your database with unnecessary data, making your site load slow. Therefore, we suggest you removing all these types of content once in a while to make sites run faster.