Drupal Performance Audit – Best Practices and Areas to Focus!

Modern businesses need robust technologies that can give them future-proof results and sustainability. Drupal is one such CMS that is apt for current market needs. This platform has the capability to bring traffic to your website.

Drupal content management system has unreal functionalities that help you to capture the market in the lesser time provided you update it regularly. Drupal provides exceptional UX and seamless performance to your website, however it needs to be maintained to get the same flawless performance every time.

Thus, Drupal performance audit is crucial. It reveals every major and minor issue and helps you to act accordingly to fix those problems. But the catch is, you must know from where to begin and what steps to be taken for an efficient performance audit.

If you haven't created your Drupal website yet and thinking about the cost of the Drupal website then check our article to explore costs and factors that influence a Drupal development cost.

Drupal Website Audit

The performance audit is a part of whole Drupal website audit. Overall website audit encompasses-

Functionality Audit

This survey helps you to know whether there are any obsolete modules, missing usefulness, or wrecked connections.

Best Practices Audit

It incorporates scouring the site code, modules, design, classification to ensure Drupal website is adhering to industry best practices.

Performance Audit

Speed issues, website reaction time, areas that might create problems, etc. are the part of performance audit.

On-page SEO Audit

To check if the site needs SEO improvements or progressions to the methodology, on-page SEO audit is being performed.

Security Audit

This audit investigates security loopholes and fixes the problems or potential problems.

Content Audit

Inspection of content construction to avoid related issues.

Drupal Performance Audit and Its Importance

Drupal performance audit measures your site and shows how it is acting and reacting during different circumstances. Site performance audit is significant for Drupal website since it helps you to distinguish and eliminate performance bottlenecks. Investigation by professionals and removal of problematic components boosts up end-user experience.

When a website is checked regularly, it is less prone to performance issues because of the timely detection of potential issues and keeping it updated to the latest version. Drupal performance audit protects the website from any severe damage and ensures diurnal seamless performance.

Two basic practices that can immediately improve Drupal website performance are-

Focusing on CSS Size

Colossal CSS files bring more work for the program while parsing the CSS against the HTML which hamper website speed. Thus, try to send only those CSS that are utilized on that page and eliminate them which are no longer in use.

Number of Images and Their Size

Evade using several enormous images, they harm the transmission capacity of the page. Use optimized images and don’t overdo with them.

Regular Drupal Updates

A website might run on any version of Drupal; however, it is recommended to update the website to latest version of Drupal. While migrating your Drupal 7 or older website to Drupal 9 or 10, migration audit is needed to evade last minute complications.

Drupal keeps on releasing latest updates, security patches, and other upgrades to fine-tune the website’s performance and security. Therefore, updating your Drupal website and auditing regularly keep it in sound health.

Areas to focus while Drupal performance audit

Performance and SEO of your Drupal website

Review Sitemap and Meta tag modules and check if they are configured properly or not, because sitemaps and meta tags help search engines to recognize site’s important pages.

To guide web crawlers on how you want your website to be scanned, check Robots.txt file in site’s root directory. Also, make sure the images on website are in WebP or AVIF format. They offer top-notch compression without harming the quality of image and download them faster.

Upgrade the website server for memory caching to reduce server’s initial response time. Optimize the application logic to make all the pages faster.

Maintain Top-Notch Drupal Site Security

Drupal core must be updated. Additionally, you can use Drupal Security kit contributed module, to lower the risks of being exploit.

Use Security Review module to check security vulnerabilities. This module runs many checks before generating comprehensive security report.

Don’t keep important files in public folder, move them to private folder and update the permission on it. Because public folders are easy access for hackers; they can file path to access various website resources and harm your website.

One more crucial point is to use Password Policy module and keep passwords strong to protect information.

To Review Site Building Overview

Ensure that the config sync is properly set or not. Do not keep such modules that are not in use, uninstall them. Whatever errors and warnings you receive in status reports needed to be fixed on priority. Apply security update for every contributed module.

All dependencies must be managed via composer and not through Git. Check GitIgnore set up and do it properly if not done yet. Git should not contain directories like vendor, contrib module, contrib theme, or Drupal core.

To Scan Best Drupal Performance Audit Practices

Always follow Drupal’s coding standards and best practices. You have a command line tool (Coder) to scan custom modules and themes for compliance and it generates reports as well. The module ensures high-quality of Drupal code.

Reasons, Why On-Time Drupal Performance Audit Is Important to Execute

All performance-affecting factors become visible

Factors like page layout, design, unwanted code, broken links, unoptimized images, and other bugs badly hamper website performance. Drupal performance audit help troubleshoot these factors and update them for the sake of top-notch website performance.

To get Drupal improvement insights and suggestions

The performance audit scans your website thoroughly and provides you with essential and important insights about the website's different components. These insights help you upscale your website’s quality and enhance profits. It can be overwhelming to keep all the plugins, modules, and functionalities updated, but that is the only option to deliver seamless experience to all your users.

It gets you more leads from potential customers

When you work on website code and speed issues, you somehow add quality to your website core and impress users every time by flawless performance. It aids in retaining existing customers and generating newer leads.

It boosts your overall ROI

When a website is maintained and all its pain points are being removed regularly, the website works well in terms of business sales, and hence organization’s ROI increases.

Expectations from an Effective Performance Audit

Website’s consistent responses

A good audit will accord consistent response to your website every time. When you test functions regularly and update them on time or remove the performance impediments, they give same results consistently.

Quantifiable information

Performance audit gives you insights about performance, configuration, and structure of the website. If the audit execution is done by best practices, it will not give vague statements, instead it will give you exact amount of time take by functions to perform, and accurate results produced by functions. Thus, you can completely rely on the information.

Contextual awareness

A website can or cannot perform some tasks, depending on its purpose. Therefore, a reliable Drupal performance audit should not expect unreal results from the website and focus on the environment on which Drupal performance audit is being done. For instance, production environment is ought to have production modules and not developmental.

Provides actionable suggestions

An efficient Drupal performance audit gives results and recommendations that are easy to understand. Simple steps of suggestions that can be taken to improve performance, content, configuration, etc. In short, an audit not just tells what is wrong with the website but also how can you fix the issues.

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Tools that can be used for Drupal performance audit

1. PageSpeed Insight

Page speed insight tool is free to use to diagnose and resolve problems that are hindrances for Drupal website speed. Moreover, it also gives you a clear picture of how your users are using the website.

2. YSlow

This tool is based on Yahoo’s high-performance site guidelines and just like PageSpeed Insight tool, it is made to see why web pages are loading slowly. After analysing, it gives suggestion on how to improve.

3. New Relic

It is a comprehensive Drupal audit module to monitor different facets of your Drupal website, such as, infrastructure, browser, server, and application. And cherry on the top is, you can easily track performance of the website and real-time traffic in the form of graphs and charts.

4. Performance Monitor

This performance audit tool helps you to compare different servers and lets you know how well your website is performing in real-time. It also evaluates performance of the entire system of website such as, database, file operations, and CPU.

5. Lighthouse Chrome DevTools

It helps you with important insights about website performance, accessibility, SEO, and other facets.

6. Site Audit

This is a Drupal module that generates analysis report on distinct facets of your website and give recommendations based on analysis.

Wrapping up

Creating a website is not only complicated but it requires a lot of specific efforts to get the best out of whatever resources you have. But your website will be most likely to encounter bigger problems in terms of performance if you skip its audit part. The regular Drupal performance audit is requiring for exceptional user experience to your targeted audience.

As mentioned above, a performance audit lets you know all the emerging and potential website problems and helps you to fix them. Moreover, you cannot sit back and relax if it has been done once; this must be a regular process. Follow the best practices of Drupal website creation and performance audit and enjoy its seamless performance!

Hiring a professional Drupal development agency is the right choice if you want to make your website performance seamless. Skynet Technologies is Drupal Association organization member who provides custom Drupal development and white-label Drupal development services. Contact us at [email protected] now to skyrocket your ROI with help of an experienced Drupal developer or fill out the form below to request a free quote.