In this talk, Tag1 Consulting, the leading experts in Drupal performance, provide a brief overview of our performance audit process, review the most common problems we’ve found across dozens of audits, show you quick wins that can be implemented in hours, and discuss more fundamental architectural issues.

Our team helped create most of Drupal’s performance capabilities (BigPipe, Cache, Dynamic Page Cache, Memcached, etc.) so we’re frequently involved in performance audits as well as integrating performance testing into DevOps tooling. First, we’ll share an overview of our audit process - knowing where to focus, and how to iterate, as well as properly diagnosing problems, triaging, and choosing what to fix within your given constraints (e.g., time, money) is critical to success.

Then, we’ll walk you through the top 8 most common problems we find, issues we see in almost every audit, and show you the fixes that we would usually suggest. Some are quick wins that almost everyone can implement in a matter of hours. Others, on the other hand, are more fundamental issues, which require more work to fix as they are related to the architecture of the project. We will explain how to avoid those when planning your next project.

Lastly, we’ll give you a quick preview of the work we are doing with Google to improve Drupal’s Core Web Vitals to provide you with a few more quick wins to speed up your site.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this session attendees will be able to:
use a few simple tricks to improve the performance of their site, in a matter of hours
understand some important architecture-related performance considerations and apply them when planning the architecture of their next site,
perform basic performance analysis and be able to include it in their development process.

Prerequisites

The session will benefit beginners and more advanced developers/builders alike, as well as technology leadership; attendees will get the most out of this session if they are familiar with the basics of Drupal - entities, modules, Views, and render arrays.

Synopsis

Tag1 helped create much of Drupal’s performance capabilities; we regularly perform performance audits and will share our process, the most common problems we find, how to fix those, and discuss more fundamental architectural improvements.