How to Speed UP Drupal 7

Submitted by pagetron on Mon, 05/28/2012 - 08:02

For whatsoever purpose you use Drupal 7 as your blogging platform, you have noticed that it runs extremely slow in shared hosting environment. Since the majority of the new bloggers use shared hosting, there are quite a few tweaks that might improve the performance of your site almost 40-60 percent up.  Despite its slow speed, you may consider sticking to Drupal because of its neat core coding, security, clean editors and above all it is an extremely SEO friendly blogging platform. I guess Drupal core developer will pay much attention to the speed up process of Drupal in the upcoming versions of Drupal 7.  Enough of my unnecessary talking. Let’s see what modules you need to turn off to increase the speed of Drupal 7. The following are the list of modules that you will find in the module section of Drupal admin panel. What you have to do it to disable the following modules.

  • Update manager
  • Toolbar

Before disabling the toolbar you can download “admin menu” module, which will make your Drupal dashboard run faster.

Optimize MySql database.

You can use the database optimization tool from MyPHP admin of your cPanel. For optimization of MySql, you need to   go to MyPHP admin and select your database for Drupal which will be something like  databasename_drpl;  and then go to the end of that page and select “check all” to select all the tables in your database. Next, select the “optimize table” from the “with selected” option, which is just beside “check all” option. Finally, click on the go button.

The following is the MySQL parameters that help to boost the speed of Drupal. You can check this settings from the MyPHPAdmin section of your cPanel.

 

speed up drupal.png

Enable Caching in Drupal

Enable Drupal Caching for a faster page load time. To enable caching, go at configuration in your dashboard, and then click on performance in the “development” option.  Select all the options for caching. If you want to set the caching time, you can do so. You can set the setting time according to your personal requirements. Normally, the higher caching time is better unless you are publishing new contents in every hour. If your blog get updated a number of times in a day then set the caching time for at least few hours.

Install the module boost

This module will help you to set the caching time for HTML, XML and JAVA scripts. You can set the cache time depending on the content updating and publishing frequency of our blog.

 

For further reading about speeding up Drupal you can take a look at the following references:

  1. http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/sessions/damn-quick-drupal-how-make-drupal-perform-and-scale-rockstar
  2. http://drupal.org/node/326504
  3. http://groups.drupal.org/node/21897
  4. http://2bits.com/articles/tips-on-speeding-up-your-drupal-sites.html

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