Drupal is one of the most powerful Content Management Systems that powers millions of websites around the world. This open source platform is scalable making it a favorite with the developer community. Add to it the fact that it is open source, SEO friendly and has thousands of modules allowing you to achieve the feature and functionality you want and it doesn’t get bigger than this. But, does developing your website using Drupal guarantee your success? Not really! Unless you follow the best practices of Drupal development and get the optimization part right, you won’t be able to guarantee a successful website. Here in this short write-up we shall discuss a few optimization tricks that will help you get the best out of your Drupal powered website.
Work On a Plan
It all starts with a plan and you need to know what you are planning to build. You can create the website or the web platform in a phased manner, but you need to have a clear cut design and content strategy. Modular architecture of Drupal allows you to easily add content and functionalities in the future, but you need to have a well-organized wireframe in mind before you start with the project.
Caching View Module
It is one of the most used modules in Drupal, and if you are using it you need to make sure that the views instances are cached. This ensures that when a user comes to the site, a cached copy is returned, and there is no need to rebuild views every time the site is loaded. This enhances the performance of the website and can save a lot of bandwidth.
Get Rid of Unused Modules
If you have unused modules it is better to get rid of them, as they can pose many risks to your website. Since, you aren’t going to update these modules they become the breeding ground for malicious programs that may affect site’s performance.
Tune MySQL
By default most users would use MySQL as their database and if you belong to this group you need to tune it for better performance. Start by running MySQL Tuning Primer Script and this will immediately analyze your entire database and recommend changes that can help you boost performance.
Site Speed Effects Performance
Nobody likes a slow and sluggish website, and this is one of the things that you must focus on while developing the site. Great design and content may not save your day if the visitors find your site loading at snail’s pace. There are a number of modules that let you test the speed at which your site loads and pinpoint at the causes of slowness. Install such a module and run a performance check and this will help you deal with the causes of slowness if any.
To get the best out of your Drupal website, you need to hire the services of a professional Drupal development company. At Semaphore Softwarewe are one of the pioneers of Drupal development and have built websites from scratch using this CMS platform. Our developers arte well versed with the latest development in the Drupal ecosystem and implement this in our projects. Write to us at info@semaphore-software.com to know more.
