Free Performance Boost on Drupal Production Websites

Often when I browse the web and stumble on a website that looks to be built using Drupal I usually take a look at the source code for it. Way to often I am then facing a wall of links to CSS files and JavaScripts. This is not only true for small sites, I have seen it on big popular websites as well.

Then I am thinking - How in £#&% can they miss the Performance settings that Drupal comes with as standard?

For a small website its not a big issue, but for popular websites with lots of traffic not using them is going to affect the performance a lot. Even worse, if your website uses a lot of CSS files, there will be problems with Internet Explorer since it can only handle up to 31 of those links. And your custom CSS styles are usually last in that list!

Changing the performance settings in Drupal is so easy that there are no excuses for not doing it. Below I will give you a few recommendations.

Recommended Performance Settings for Drupal 6

Open www.example.com/admin/settings/performance for your Drupal production website and do the following:

• Caching mode - Set it to Normal. Only use Agressive if you know what you do.
• Minimum cache lifetime - Depending on traffic select a value that suits your site. If you mostly have anonymous visitors and static content you can use a higher value.
• Page compression - Turn it on. This will compress the pages, making them load faster as well as use much less bandwidth for you hosting account.
• Block cache - Turn it on. If you use a lot of blocks this will have an affect on load time and performance.
• Optimize CSS files - Turn it on! This setting will prevent problems with Internet Explorer, as well as make your pages load faster.
• Optimize JavaScript files - Turn it on. Same as for CSS, it will reduce load time for your pages.

All of the above settings are safe for virtually every website built on Drupal 6. Combined they will make your website more responsive, quicker to load and you will also use much less bandwidth on your hosting account.

Best of all, you get it for free after 30 seconds work.

Just remember that if you make any changes to the productions site, such as modifying the theme, blocks and so on you should always click on the "Clear cached data" button at the bottom of the same page. That will rebuild all the cached files the performance settings are using.

Now do it and enjoy your free boost!