The overall performance of your website is the alpha and omega of your traffic rates, conversion rates, relevance and reputation online. Three main reasons why website speed matters include:
It impacts your SEO ranking
Search ranking robots of Google, for instance, favor fast-loading, smoothly-performing websites, putting resources with the most convenient UX at the top positions in the search results list. So the overall speed of loading and performance can really help boost your SEO readings.
The overall UX is hindered by slow loading
Nobody likes to wait for a cumbersome loading of the site. And more so than search robots, this concerns human users whose time is precious and UX demands are quite high. Proper performance indicators help you capture the attention span of potential users, which is about 1-3 seconds, after which people usually leave the site if it isn’t loaded properly. Thus, balancing out the speed of page loading and elements functioning influences the overall level of user experience in the most positive way.
Conversion rates and sales are affected
In the long run, it all comes down to your website’s monthly/quarterly/yearly (you name it) revenue and expenses statistics. And a rapidly-loading, feature-rich web store with smooth navigation and perfectly working elements will certainly bring more conversions and profits than a mediocre, basic resource.
Many companies and entrepreneurs far and wide employ Drupal as the backbone of their websites due to the outstanding performance power and flexibility opportunities it provides. But not everybody knows how to properly expand the capabilities of Drupal further in order to achieve some truly outstanding results. In particular, compatible modules help with that.
And you need to know which exact modules are “all the rage” right now in terms of making your Drupal-based web resource run smoother, faster, and better as a whole. Let’s take a look at the top options right now.
Best Drupal Modules You Should Install
As it becomes increasingly popular, you may have already heard about this one, providing unprecedented spam and IP address protection, cash clearing, and overall web performance acceleration opportunities. CloudFlare will help you boost the loading speed by 30% while saving about 60% of bandwidth. This module requires the site owner to use the CloudFlare 3-rd party CDN service and also have an Ops engineer to set it up properly.
Images are visual elements that affect the overall performance of any website in a major way, not to mention the effect of the image load speed on your SEO. A good, fast website is enabled to work with images in the fastest, most hassle-free way. The Image API Optimize module should help you with this when it comes to a Drupal-powered site, granting accelerated image loading and visual assets optimization without any quality sacrifices.
As the name implies, this Drupal module helps initiate a full-on purge of cache and all the obsolete data residue without going far and wasting effort. In particular, it makes it really simple to handle the cache generated by external caching systems, allows to reverse CDNs and proxies upon real content changes, and smoothes out the content delivery routine all around.
Missing error pages are among the most relevant issues to be handled by any website owner. And with a proper approach to handling them - or, plainly put, with a fitting module - you can handle 404 errors in a way beneficial to the operation of the whole site. Fast 404 helps timely cache 404 pages, speeding up both the displaying of 404 and the overall response time of the website.
For the ultimately smooth performance, the content must be loaded and delivered to the end-user fast and conveniently, without any geo-based limitations. A dedicated content delivery network allows doing that while the CDN module that can be easily integrated with it boosts the process. Namely, the module dynamically changes URLs of files and removes any loading speed caps dictated by the user’s geographical location to grant much faster content loading.
6. Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation
Advanced CSS/JS aggregation module enables cache management and bandwidth optimization options as well as customization options including DNS prefetch, .gz/.br compression options, CDN, CSS minify and others.
Summary
What do you think about these modules? Have you already tried any one of them? If you are looking for specialists to help you integrate them or complete any sort of Drupal-related tasks, contact us for the input of our extensive expertise in the matter.
Alpha Web Group offers essential performance optimization services implemented by seasoned specialists with a vast profiled experience. We can help you properly scale your digital business, boost the level of customer loyalty, enhance SEO results, speed up the promotion of your web resource, and more.