Recently, a client with a Drupal site built in-house contacted us looking to improve its performance. We did some initial testing, and the average load time for the login page was 3.04 seconds.* We also used the very helpful web page performance analysis tool YSlow, which gave a grade of C. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Well, it turns out that in the web world, speed matters. Delays that seem like they would be imperceptible create a real difference in user satisfaction and, in the case of ecommerce sites, conversion rates. In addition, slow page loads can and will negatively affect your search ranking.

Here's the good news: in about 20 minutes, we were able to double performance to an average of 1.52 seconds per page load and boost YSlow's grade to a solid A. We did this by:

1. re-tuning Drupal's stock configuration
2. adding a couple of extra modules
3. re-configuring the web server software

There are many additional strategies that we employ where appropriate high-traffic web sites, or those where the absolute maximum in performance is required. In this case, we were able to dramatically improve our client's site performance in a very budget-friendly manner.

_{* Page load times were measured from refresh to the on-load event as an average of 5 tests, with browser caching turned off.}