< Drupal Optimization />
Entrust your Drupal site to experts in web performance
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Don't let your site be left behind by outdated technical choices!
< Our web performance experts optimize your Drupal site to meet the highest standards />
Strengthen the trust of Google and your users
Improving your Drupal site's performance means ensuring it loads quickly and offers a high-quality browsing experience. The benefit is twofold:
- Strengthen the trust of Google, which will crawl your site more and therefore index more content, more often. Essential Web Signals in the green also allow you to benefit from an SEO visibility boost on mobile.
- Improve the User Experience in the field (in the Chrome User Experience Report), with positive developments in engagement: bounce rate, pages viewed per session, conversion rate to your goals…
Ultimately, providing a good browsing experience for your visitors is an essential lever for maximizing your site’s potential. It’s an investment that will mechanically translate into an increase in your revenue.
A service in 4 key steps
Our Drupal optimizations are broken down into several key stages.
Technical Alignment
01Our experts meet with your technical teams to learn more about your site: what is its history, what is its technical stack beyond Drupal, what performance issues have possibly already been identified and/or addressed… This is an essential exchange to ensure the relevance of our intervention.
Tracking Implementation
02We place a tag on your site that collects performance data from your real users. This "RUM" data is used to precisely identify bottlenecks. Thanks to this data-driven approach, we operate with maximum visibility on your issues.
We deploy Lighthouse monitors on your key pages to provide you with a synthetic view of performance evolution. Launched every 8 hours, they allow us to put numbers on mobile and desktop gains. Practical for those who track Core Web Vitals metrics in a tool like PageSpeed Insights.
Drupal Optimization
03We audit your site with a rigorous methodology and advanced tools to identify its technical weaknesses. We then correct them one by one by intervening on the templates of your pages, sections, and components managed by the Drupal theme and modules. This is the core expertise of our web performance experts.
Intervention Report
04We meet with your teams again to present the results of our work. We detail the modified elements and provide valuable advice to ensure skill development in web performance topics. Your developers and business teams can get precise answers to their questions.
They entrusted us with their Drupal optimization
Why is a Drupal site slow ?
Drupal is fast by design, but four factors slow it down in production: poorly configured or disabled cache, overly costly views, an accumulation of contributed modules, and a theme that loads unnecessary libraries. Cache is by far the biggest factor, as Drupal offers several levels that few installations truly utilize.
Drupal's core indeed includes an internal page cache, a dynamic cache for authenticated users, and a cacheability metadata system that finely invalidates each block. A site left in development mode loses all of this, and regenerates the entire render on each request, including for anonymous visitors.
Views come in second place. A poorly filtered view, without a result limit, or joined to multiple entities, produces costly SQL queries replayed on each display. The problem worsens with content volume: a view that is acceptable with a thousand nodes becomes a bottleneck with a hundred thousand.
Finally, there are contributed modules and the theme. Each module adds its own CSS and JavaScript libraries, often attached globally rather than to the relevant pages. Resource aggregation masks the symptom without treating the cause: bytes are still served, simply grouped into fewer files.
Have a question?
We have the answer!
Consult the FAQ for details about the service.
Should we prioritize optimization or an audit?
Both services can lead to the same result, namely improving the performance of your Drupal site. The choice mainly depends on your technical teams, and more particularly on the answers to the following questions:
- do the developers have the necessary bandwidth to implement the recommendations provided as part of an audit?
- do the developers have the necessary experience and/or technical maturity to deploy multiple front-end optimizations?
- are the developers willing to cooperate with a third party, and are they prepared to question current choices?
If any of the answers to these questions are negative, optimization by us is probably the most judicious choice. Conversely, if everything is positive, then an audit will be more relevant, and particularly more educational for your teams.
How much does Drupal site optimization cost?
Our Drupal optimization service is a fixed price. It includes the four key steps presented above, but also all the support from our teams, both pre-sales and post-sales.
Drupal optimization costs between €2,500 and €3,500 excluding tax, depending on the version in place, the number of contributed modules, and the complexity of the views to optimize. For a quote matching your scope, contact us by message or phone: Marylise will send you a personalized proposal.
Which Drupal modules improve performance?
Start with what the core already provides, before installing anything: internal page cache, dynamic cache, and resource aggregation have been native since Drupal 8. The majority of gains are achieved without additional modules, simply by exiting development mode and correctly configuring these three mechanisms.
Beyond that, three families of modules bring real value: in-memory cache storage, via Redis or Memcached, which unloads the database; external invalidation, which purges a reverse proxy or CDN upon publication; and responsive image modules. Each addresses a layer that the core does not cover.
Be wary, however, of modules that promise general optimization. They add an extra execution layer to compensate for a missing setting and hide the diagnosis: an extra module is rarely the answer to a slow site; it's most often a missing cache setting or a poorly constructed view.
Is Drupal faster than WordPress?
With equivalent configuration, yes, on complex sites. Drupal natively includes a much finer metadata-based caching system, capable of invalidating a specific block rather than an entire page: it better handles custom content and authenticated users, where WordPress relies on extensions to achieve this.
The gap reverses on simple sites. A well-built WordPress, on a minimalist theme and with good hosting, achieves the same Core Web Vitals as a Drupal, for a lower implementation cost. Drupal's complexity only pays off beyond a certain threshold of volume, multilingualism, or rights management.
In practice, the comparison makes little sense in the field. On the sites we audit, the performance gap between two installations of the same CMS always exceeds the average gap between the two CMSs. Implementation decides, not the choice of CMS: hosting, cache, theme, and modules weigh much more heavily.
