Top Drupal modules that will increase your website's performance

Top Drupal modules to increase website performance

Introduction

If you made a cool design, planned out the great user experience, added a chatbot, got a lot of high-quality traffic, and think that the job is done, we have some awful news for you. If you have all of the above but the site loads in about 15-30 seconds,  any businesses can be out of the game very soon.

Do you remember your feelings when you go switch from the search engine to a site, and it shows you a white screen for too long? You wait, wait, wait … As a result, you get bored, you close this tab, go back to the search engine, and click on the next site. 

People don't wait and go to your competitors - this is what you should keep in mind. One way out - to increase the performance of your site. High-performance sites offer visitors a good experience and help you reach your goals. All researchers agree that the optimal load time is from 1.5 to 3 seconds. So, if you can reduce the site loading time to 3 seconds then it will be enough for your site to be faster than many existing ones. This means that even minor site improvements can lead to tangible benefits for your business.

What is web performance? Web performance is all about making websites fast, including making slow processes seem fast. Does the site load quickly, allow the user to start interacting with it promptly? Are scrolling and animations smooth? How content is rendered? 

Let’s consider the advantages of the website with high performance:

  1. Fast page load improves the user experience, increases your page views.
  2. Search engines don’t allow sites with low performance to be on the top. Obviously, websites with high performance may be on the first positions of the search. 
  3. The likelihood of users’ return to the site increases if your website has a high-performance score. 

Sometimes the problem with performance is on the surface and it can be solved by installing particular Drupal modules. This is one of the easiest ways of improving website performance. Below, we will consider such modules. The Drupal modules are add-ons that can upgrade your site. However, firstly I want to say that a default Drupal website already has the tools out-of-the-box to improve performance. Settings are in the Admin - Settings - Performance menu. Here are some Drupal out-of-the-box module examples:

  • The Internal Page Cache module caches pages for anonymous users. 
  • The Dynamic Page Cache module makes it possible to cache pages with dynamic content. Pages requested by users (anonymous or authenticated) are stored the first time they are requested and can then be reused. 
  • The BigPipe module. For the first time, this technique was invented by Facebook. That's the simplest solution: have the lazily loaded content appear in a space that is reserved for it, that avoids reflowing content.

Any Drupal website also contains the Responsive image module because Drupal has it in its core. It uses responsive images that means loading images that have been specifically cropped for a user screen based on breakpoints (example: image sizes are optimized for mobile devices).

So, we cleared this up. It's time for the reason we're all here tonight. Now, we want to introduce you to 7 top Drupal modules that will boost the performance of your Drupal 8 website.

Memcache API and Integration

It’s a popular choice for accelerating the cache by placing the cache in memory instead of disk. It will significantly reduce the load on the database or file system and speed up the work of the site, due to the fact that working with memory is faster than with the database or files.

Fastly

It’s a module for integration with a real-time content delivery network (CDN) that improves the performance of websites, mobile applications. Also, Fastly allows you to have full control over your configuration settings, and implement changes in real-time. 

Purge

The module facilitates cleaning external caching systems, reverse proxies, and CDNs as content actually changes. This module makes content delivery more efficient, resilient, and better protected from traffic spikes.

Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation

The AdvAgg module allows you to boost the front-end performance of your site. If you want your website pages to load faster, install this module. It contains several submodules - read all information on the official Drupal website.

CloudFlare

If you want your website to load 30% faster you should add this module. Also, the websites which have CloudFlare are protected from many types of malicious actions, including comment spam, email collection, and many others. 

Blazy

This module provides a lazy picture downloading. Due to Lazy loading images are loaded gradually, as a user scrolls the site. This allows you to speed up the site because when you first load the site, it will not load a large number of images that are not needed on the first screen.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

To convert Drupal pages into pages that comply with the AMP standard, use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Accelerated mobile pages or AMP is a technology that provides convenient access to information on the Internet from the screens of smartphones and tablets. AMP pages are created for static content and differ from normal pages by high download speed. 

Image Optimize (or ImageAPI Optimize)

ImageAPI Optimize allows you to optimize the image losslessly when they are saved. Usually, the size reductions on the original image vary between 10-30 KB if the image was not optimized before. The module has built-in support for core image styles and a service allowing use in different modules. 

The Drupal modules are ready-made solutions that can solve a lot of problems fast, and easily, and installation won’t cost a lot. If you want to make your website well-performing then adding necessary modules can be a good way of website optimization. And don’t forget to hire a professional web development team to keep them up to date. 

Useful links

  1. If you have a website on Drupal 7, we suggest you read the article "Drupal 7 Performance Tips" to improve its performance in different ways. 
  2. Learn more about a website audit and get a free website performance check-up tools list for free in the article "How to conduct a website audit: a beginner's guide".
  3. If you want to improve or create an education website read the article "Drupal modules for a university website" with a useful selection of the Drupal modules here.
  4. If your website still isn’t integrated with Social Media read the article about Drupal modules for integration with Social Media, and make your website user-friendly.
  5. Learn more about how to prepare your module for Drupal 9.
  6. 10 Drupal modules for quizzes

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