Maximizing Site Speed with Mercy Corps

Performance tweaks to a Drupal site can fall into one of two categories: Game changing, or marginal. Sometimes those margins can add up, but where these gains can be made isn’t always clear. For organizations who rely on their public site to drive fundraising, speed, and engagement are a number one priority. In this session, we will review efforts made in a collaboration between Forum One and Mercy Corps in improving the performance of www.mercycorps.org. We will review a variety of approaches along with benchmark data to demonstrate just how much of an improvement each approach made. By implementing these ideas on your own site, you can:

• Decrease bounce rates.

• Increase user engagement.

• Increase conversion rates.

• Improve SEO.

• Make your digital staff happy and more productive.

Improvements will range from simple changes that can be made in the administrative interface, optimizing the front end, caching best practices and server configuration. We will also demonstrate the tools used to measure these improvements in discrete increments, and as a collective whole. With the knowledge from this session, you will be able to offer your end users a fast experience that will draw them to engage with your site.