Fact is, that 47% of users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. Being such a critical component of almost all websites, whether it is e-commerce, news, corporate websites, blogs or travel portals, speed optimization is important, and perhaps the lowest hanging fruit, when it comes to improving the front–end performance of your site. Here are seven ways to keep your website speed up to standard.
Image Optimization
Images usually take almost 50% of a website’s weight. As a result optimizing these images to the best possible format, dimension, size and resolution will significantly increase the website’s speed. Drupal 8 effectively resizes images in order to reduce the bandwidth needed for a page’s loading.
Be up-to-date
Regular updates of your website ensure that the latest version will always be installed. The newest version’s installation will ensure bugs removal and implementation of major improvements that can increase your site performance.
CSS and JS aggregation in the performance page
CSS and JS aggregation can be easily enabled through the Bandwidth Optimization tab and it can further improve the download times because the browser will not have to fetch many files. As a result, the HTTP requests will be significantly less which will result in speed improvement and reduction of page loading times.
Coding Standards
“The Drupal Coding Standards apply to code within Drupal and its contributed modules.”Drupal Coding Standards should be respected within Drupal and its contributed modules. Some coding standards are, indenting and whitespace, operators, casting, control structures, line length and wrapping. Avoiding coding standards can result, not only in slow performance, but also in significant malfunctions as well.
Database Query Optimization
To make a system faster, we have to reduce the stuff that we load with it. It is clear that sometimes modules make our development life easier, however when the development process finishes and we do not require these modules any longer, it is ideal to disable them to lighten the labor work that Drupal does. Disable unnecessary modules like:
Devel
Statistics
Update Status
Administration Development Tools
Taxonomy
Cache, cache, cache.
Browser caching stores cache versions of static resources, a process that quickens page speed tremendously and reduces server lag. Two caching options that can be enabled are the following:
Turn Page caching on
Turn Views caching on
These two options are the best way to increase your website speed as they come from Drupal’s core. Caching is a way to save elements of a website and only use them when someone visits the site.
Lazy Load Images
A good module for lazy load images is Image Lazyloader, as it ensures that the image will only be loaded when it is visible to the browser window. Therefore, when in any case an image is not visible to the browser, it will never load and this will save us time from loading the whole page.
Ready for a faster, more user-friendly site? Find out how an updated infrastructure can keep things loading quickly by getting in touch with us.
