Improved loading speed
Web Performance Optimization
To talk about WPO (or Web Performance Optimization), is to talk about optimizing the loading times of your website, which is desirable to improve the user experience and SEO.
Improve user experience and SEO
Web Performance Optimization
As with any other web-based technology, there are many things that can affect the loading times on a Drupal website. I can help you optimize the speed of your website so that it loads as fast as possible.
There are always things to improve, but you have to know how to prioritize and decide which ones have more impact and which ones are out of budget or with reduced impact.
Frontend
There are performance improvements that are attributable to the visual part of the web. For example:
- Not compressing css/js files
- Not using images optimized for different screen resolutions.
- Loading js files that are not really needed on all pages
- Using maps instead of images
- Loading videos or audios in the background
- ....
These types of performance problems usually affect users with poor internet connection (or using cell phones), and are not problems that get worse with a high number of concurrent visits to your website.
Backend
There are performance improvements that are basically by use of inefficient code. For example:
- Misuse of caches
- Not using Redis or Memcache
- Not using a CDN
- Having custom code that is not optimized or that invalidates Drupal caches.
- Connecting to third party APIs in real time
- Having Views or the SearchAPI configured incorrectly
- Obsolete PHP versions or bad server configurations
- Having a lot of unresolved PHP error logs
- ...
These types of problems are hardly noticeable if you have few visitors, but the moment your business takes off and receives a large number of concurrent visitors then the server becomes too small and the website starts to slow down or crash. These are the problems that make you need an oversized server with lots of RAM and CPU.
Way of working
In most cases I usually recommend working with APM tools, such as NewRelic. This allows you to have an overview and tracking of what is really happening on your Drupal website.
If we know that the problem is in specific pages, then you can use tools like Blackfire or Xdebug in development environments.
For each specific case we have to see what are really important problems and see if we have to focus more on frontend, backend or both.
Each project is different and a customized analysis has to be done to find the performance problems.
Have Any Project in Mind?
If you want to do something in Drupal maybe you can hire me.
Either for consulting, development or maintenance of Drupal websites.