Drupal: Optimizing the website speed

There are several ways to optimize the your Drupal website:

• Enable Drupal caches
• Daily Automatic optimization of the database tables

Before you start

Before you start to optimize your website, you first have to measure the current speed.

This is can be done with this service: www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Afterwards you can measure the speed again.

Enable Drupal caches

In the following menu you can change the cache settings:

Home » Administer » Site configuration » Performance

• Caching mode: Normal
• The Page compression is normally not necessary, because your Apache2 server will probably already compress the data. But if not, enable the compression.
• Block cache: Enabled
• Select Optimize CSS files: Enabled
• I tried to enable Optimize JavaScript files, but I was getting error messages and switched it off.

Dayly database optimization

When you install and activate the module DB maintenance, it will be possible to optimize the database every day.

After activation of the module, you can go to the menu:

Home » Administer » Site configuration » DB maintenance

• Select all tables
• Click on ‘Save configuration’

The cron-job wil now optimize your database every day.