Knowledgebase
How to optimize the performance of your Drupal
Here are some tips on how to make your Drupal site faster:
- Turn on page and block caching. You can do that from the admin panel of your Drupal. Go to Configuration tab>Performance, mark the checkboxes for the two cache options and click on the Save configuration button.
- Enable the settings for aggregating and compressing CSS and javascript files. These settings are one the same page as the one for the cache (admin>Configuration tab>Performance).
- Don't remove the mod_expires and mod_headers directives that are in the default .htaccess file that comes prepackaged with Drupal (the .htaccess file that's in the root directory).
- Use mod_deflate to compress the data transfer between the server and the client. You can do this by putting some rules in the .htaccess file that's in the root Drupal directory on your Drupal hosting account.
- Update your Drupal when there's a new stable version.
- Don't install too many contributed modules.
- Use performance modules for speeding up your site. For example, you can use a module such as Boost for better caching.
- Optimize and repair the MySQL database used by your Drupal. You can do that with phpMyAdmin.
- Switch from CGI to FastCGI. You can do that from the PHP Settings section of the Pixie control panel.
- Don't use too many images and graphics.
- Don't give anonymous users the permission to use the search function. By default, it can be used only by registered users.
For more details on how to speed up your Drupal you can also check our Drupal optimization tutorial.