Top modules to increase your Drupal website's performance

Do you want your site to be the first in the search results, make users feel comfortable using it, and get a high conversion rate? Just make it as fast as possible!

Your website's speed is essential because, if the website is fast, users will visit it more often. Statistics say that if a user waits for 3 seconds and more, they will leave the website and never return. The most comfortable loading time for users is 2 seconds. You may ask:

Why do I need to improve the performance of the site?

It influences your Google ranking!

Today there are so many modules to speed up your site and to choose the best one would take hours. Drudesk web development agency offers a ready made list of the five best Drupal modules to increase site performance.

Core Web Vitals: the new official Google ranking factor

In 2021 Google will run a new method of ranking — Core Web Vitals. This is a metric of real user experience, which Google analyzes.

It analyzes what experience users get when they open your website, especially regarding site speed and ability to interact.

Core Web Vitals will affect all organic search results in desktop and mobile devices. Plus, CWV will be the main criteria by which pages will be selected to display in the "Top News" block.

Three elements of Core Web Vitals:

To better understand the essence of the new CWV, we suggest looking at its three signals.

1. Largest Contentful Paint

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the time spent downloading your site content (should be no more than 2.5 seconds).

2. First Input Delay

First Input Delay (FID) is the page response time after some user's action (should be no more than 100 ms).

3. Cumulative Layout Shift

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a layout shift of visual page content (no more than 0.1).

Accordingly, if you take these indicators into account, then your site will rank better. It's like a step-by-step guide, an official cheat-sheet to bring your site to the first position.

What is Website Performance?

Website performance is the amount of time during which users wait while your website's content appears on the screen. To understand how fast your website is, you need to check it with special tools. Not so long ago, we wrote an article about the best online website speed analysis tools, check it to find out which is better for you.

Three main reasons why website speed matters

1. Page speed influence on your Google rank

Google wants to make searching fast, easy, and useful for users, so if a website loads slowly, Google will put it on the 2nd or 3rd pages. Increasing your website performance will help you to get to the first page of Google’s rank.

2. Slow Page Speed Affects User Experience

As we said before, users don't want to wait while your site loads. To increase traffic, you should make your customers happier by combining the website's appearance and speed.

3. Its Influences on Conversions and Sales

If the user experience is good, you can sell more of your services or products.

But, if most of your clients leave your website because of its performance, you lose your chance to improve your sales.

Best 5 Drupal modules to increase your site performance

There are a lot of Drupal modules that help you make your website attractive and eye-catching. Although there are many helpful modules that will help increase your Drupal modules to improve site performance.

1. Image API Optimize

The Image API Optimize allows you to optimize images when they are saved. With this module enabled, Google's Page Speed will always give you an A in image optimization.

This plugin has many features like lossless optimization, and it works with any toolkit and pluggable optimization tools.

What does the Image API Optimize module give your site:

• optimized images without quality loss
• speed up image loading
• increase the speed of your site

Version it works with: Drupal 7

Updated: 4 June 2020

2. Fast 404

The Fast 404 module combines methods of handling missing image or file 404 errors with a technique created by dpardo to deliver super-fast 404 error pages for both missing images and bad paths.

What does the Fast 404 module give your site:

• caches 404 pages, reducing their load time
• speeds up the response of your Drupal site

Version it works with: Drupal 7, 8

Updated: 17 March 2020

3. Quicklink

The Quicklink makes navigation to subsequent pages faster. It works with all modern browsers, detects links within the viewport, checks if the user isn't on a slow connection, and prefetches URLs to the links.

What does the Quicklink module give your site:

• provides link prefetching
• reduces the download time of links
• the links’ content is saved in the cache

Version it works with: Drupal 7, 8, 9

Updated: 23 May 2020

4. CloudFlare

The CloudFlare helps websites load 30% faster, use 60% less bandwidth, and process 65% fewer requests. It has such features as cash clearing by Path and restoring the client's original IP address.

What does the CloudFlare module give your site:

• protects the site from spam
• speeds up website performance
• protects the visitor's IP address

Version it works with: Drupal 7, 8, 9

Updated: 23 May 2020

5. CDN

The CDN module works to ensure that your site loads equally quickly for all users, regardless of your geographic location. The main point is that it works to provide all images, files, and content are downloaded from the CDN, but not your server.

What does the CDN module give your site:

• integrates your website with the Content Delivery Network
• spends the same time to load the page for different users
• changes file URLs for fast loading from CDN

Version it works with: Drupal 7, 8, 9

Updated: 31 March 2020

Install Drupal modules to increase site performance at Drudesk

Optimizing your website's performance is an important thing, which can help you become better and stand at the top of Google's first pages. Using modules for speeding up your Drupal site helps you improve your site's performance and make it more user-friendly.

The help of web developers from the Drudesk web support company will come in handy to get this all right. Contact us to select and install Drupal modules to increase site performance that will suit your site!