Five Tips To Increase The Speed Of Drupal 8 Websites

The speed of Drupal websites can be a major issue if they are complex or built on an under-powered server. This has become a key issue among website developers ever since Google has started giving greater importance to the speed of a website, particularly on mobile devices. Here are five tips to help you speed up Drupal 8 sites so that they work as fast as you do!

Tip One: Use Cache Properly

The most effective way to speed up a Drupal website is by properly using cache. Drupal provides some powerful caching even if no extra modules are enabled. Drupal users would know that the cache system stores a copy of the visited pages in an accessible location. After a page is viewed, it is cached and the same page loads more quickly for all the subsequent visitors.

Tip Two: Extra Caching Modules

There are two core internal caching modules enabled by default. They are:

The Internal Page Cache Module:  This module caches pages for unknown users in the database. The pages visited by anonymous users are saved for the first time and then reused for subsequent visitors.

The Internal Dynamic Page Cache Module:  The Internal Dynamic Page cache module is a new feature added to Drupal 8 and aims at speeding up the site for both unknown and logged-in users. Extra caching layers like Varnish or Redis is also added by several seasoned Drupal site builders to increase the speed of their websites.

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Tip Three: Bandwidth Optimization

Drupal 8 has done away with “compress cached pages”. On the other hand, it has introduced a default setting that optimizes external resources. The optimization reduces both the size and the number of requests made to your website. Drupal 8 makes it simple to aggregate CSS and JavaScript files so that they load together. On the Live environment, enable Aggregate and compress CSS files/ JavaScript files. This reduces the number of HTTP requests and the amount of data transferred.

Tip Four: Image Size

The image size you choose can have a tremendous impact on your website’s speed and performance. Luckily, Drupal 8 core offers tools to control and optimize image sizes. Use the Image Styles feature to have different image sizes for different devices like tablets and mobiles.

Tip Five: Remove Unused Modules

The last thing that you can do to speed up your Drupal 8 website is to uninstall unused modules. Drupal has changed the process of removing modules, so read about it before you start uninstalling modules.

Conclusion

There may be many reasons that can affect the performance of your Drupal site, but you should ensure your site is properly cached, images are the correct size, and unused modules are removed. These three things paired with appropriate bandwidth usage will put your Drupal website in the driver’s seat!

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