Improve visitor retention and speed up your website with Drupal page caching

Why speed matters

Making your business’ website as fast as possible has a whole host of benefits, from improving your search engine position to reducing your visitor bounce rate (the number of people who leave your website after viewing only one page or who leave because the page is slow loading).

We build smarter so your website is faster

Improve visitor retention by speeding up your website

We implement several methods of making the websites we design as fast as possible while still making them easy to manage for our customers. We use the built-in image processing features in the Drupal content management system (CMS) to resize images so that even if you upload a full 8MB photo from your digital camera when you write a blog post your website will automatically crop and resize this image so that the version your visitors see will be less 0.1MB – ensuring it loads quickly for your visitors. We also enable minimisation of the CSS and JavaScript code used for your website so that rather than loading 20+ individual files everything is compressed into two files, keeping the number of files the visitor’s web browser needs to download to a minimum.

Speeding things up further with caching

The modular nature of the Drupal CMS allows additional functionality to be added without needing to re-develop the whole website. With a few changes your Drupal website can be made to store copies of your pages in such a way that they load in half the time (or less) than if they were served “fresh” to each new visitor.

Using a mix of the Cache Expiration, Boost, Cache Lifetime and  Rules modules along with server-side compression we can speed up your Drupal site further with a few hours’ work without needing to re-develop or change the way you manage your site.

As an example, we turned off the caching on our own website and ran a speed test, the results were clear – without caching our homepage took 6.92 seconds to fully load, with caching enabled this was cut to 1.93 seconds. The load time of our homepage was decreased by 72% with just a few simple changes!

Want to get a speed boost? Get in touch!

Get in touch if you’d like to discuss how speeding up your website could help improve your visitors experience on your website.