What's better, fast or slow? That's right. Fast. There are a couple of ways you can tune the performance of your Drupal site to decrease page load times. Below are two simple things you can do today.
Drupal Core Performance Settings
- Go to admin/config/development/performance (Drupal 7)
- Check all the checkboxes:
- Cache pages for anonymous users
- Cache blocks
- Compress cached pages.
- Aggregate and compress CSS files.
- Aggregate JavaScript files.
- Choose an appropriate minimum cache lifetime. If content on your site does not change very frequently, you can safely set this to the maximum of 1 day.
- Typically you would set the expiration of cached pages setting to 1 day also (or whatever you set minimum cache lifetime to). This setting applies to browser caches, for example.
Views Caching
On the edit page for each View, under the "Other" section, there is a setting for Caching. You can set separate values for the Query Results and the Rendered Output. If your site content does not change very frequently, you can set that at a long duration, such as 6 days.
These two simple steps will improve page load times for anonymous users dramatically.
What Happened to My Changes?
The tradeoff with an aggressive caching configuration is that improved performance comes at the expense of changes going "live" instantaneously. I.e., if you make a change to a node, or a View, it is possible that anonymous users may still see the old, "cached" version.
You can clear all the caches by clicking the "Clear all caches" button at admin/config/development/performance, or under the Home icon in the black Administration Menu:
