Guide to Profitable Sales
Performance
The performance of your Drupal website can be improved not only with the use of some of the modules noted later, but is also fundamentally impacted by some of the design choices and configuration settings you use. A good summary notes areas you might consider in addressing performance as:
Enable Caching: Optimize Images: Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Minimize Modules: Optimize Database: Enable CSS/JavaScript Aggregation: Optimize Theme and Templates: Enable Gzip Compression: Monitor Performance: Consider Caching Modules:
The following specialized contributed modules may also be considered…
Purge module
The Purge module is a cache management alternative. It allows you to set up certain cache components to retain ‘infinitely’ those items that have not had a change. This improves performance by not having to load stuff that was already fine just like it was.
Quicklink module
Quicklink uses Google’s JavaScript Quicklink library to enable faster subsequent page-loads by prefetching in-viewport links while your input otherwise may be idle. It is claimed to improve load times by 50% via a sort of “look ahead” JavaScript effort.
Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation module
If you are using the set up established by the Drupal CICD Base Project you don’t need this module because we handle doing this directly at the php level as noted it that project’s documentation. Also, keep in mind that you have the basic control capabilities as part of Core under your Administration options. But if you really want to leverage all of it and aren’t comfortable working at the php file level, the Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation module can give you GUI access to jump your frontend performance.
Search:
Drupal already has basic search built in. However, if you have substantial content you will improve performance via enhancing modules.
Search API module:
This is a good basic interface enhancement module to support initial basic search yet be ready to move to Apache Solr search integration. You will need to do some experimentation in terms of setting it up with the facets module in the more current versions of Drupal.
The set up process is relatively complex because of the range of options for what can be indexed. This video walks you through the process and it also shows about 25 minutes into it how to switch the indexing server to Solr (requiring the Solr Search module to be installed and enabled).
The main ‘watch out’ you hear in the video is to remember to manage the access options so you aren’t exposing unpublished or other unintended information from your site via people finding it in the search. Beyond the video, effort must be taken around the approach to setting up a solr server in your hosted site container via your DevOp procedures; this is NOT discuss here but should be investigated with your host’s documentation.