Performance and optimisation

Drupal website performance and optimisation

No one likes a slow website. Slow page loads result in a poor user experience which can potentially result in a lost sale, less products sold, a cancelled membership or negative review.

EM Solutions can help you address this problem by:

1. Reviewing your current Drupal installation, supporting software stack and hosting environment
2. Establishing your performance benchmarks (response time goals)
3. Establishing your scalability requirements (peak loads)
4. Assessing the functionality of the website
5. Writing automated test cases which exercise the functionality of the website, measure performance and apply peak loads

With these test cases and initial results, EM Solutions can then set about to establish performance optimisations that can be implemented, such as:

1. Optimising the Drupal website configuration
2. Modifying Drupal modules or custom modules which are causing bottlenecks
3. Installing and configuring additional software and services to off-load the work performed by Drupal
4. Recommending alternative software stacks and hosting providers
5. Assessing other contributing factors which are impacting on performance

EM Solutions have expertise in configuring such performance enhancing software as PHP APC, Memcache, NGinx, Varnish and Pound.

The result of performance optimisation by EM Solutions is a more responsive website with increased scalability and reliability.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is essential in today’s Internet-age, good SEO ensures that your audience is able to quickly locate the information they need from your website. And that new information published on your website is quickly indexed by all popular search engines. EM Solutions includes SEO as standard in the TB Solutions website development process.

EM Solutions can apply SEO techniques to your existing Drupal website, which includes:

• Canonical URLs that exposes the structure of your website
• Automatic page and metadata, including keywords and descriptions
• Google analytics
• Search engine site map

It is important to note that good SEO also includes overall website performance and optimisation.

Social network optimisation (SNO)

Now widely recognised as more important than SEO, Social Network Optimisation (SNO) is the method of ensuring that updates and new content posted on your website is routed as quickly as possible to all applicable social media networks.

EM Solutions can recommend methods and put in place functions on your website so that:

• New and updated pages are quickly advertised on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn
• Mailing lists are maintained and automatically populated with recent content from your website
• Integration with iTunes, SoundCloud, Youtube, Vimeo, uStream and other media web services
• Discussions and comments around your content is integrated with social networks
• Discussions on social networks are pulled back into your website
• Automatic submission to content aggregation services
• RSS XML feed optimisations

Performing even basic SNO and regular social media activities greatly enhances and broadens the audience for your website.