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High Performance Drupal
book

High Performance Drupal

by Jeff Sheltren, Narayan Newton, Nathaniel Catchpole
October 2013
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
261 pages
7h 4m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from High Performance Drupal

Chapter 2. Frontend Performance

The principles of frontend performance apply regardless of the underlying application used to create a website. The browser receives an HTML document and, based on its contents, downloads CSS, JavaScript, fonts, and images; it then renders the page using all of these. The 14 rules defined by Steve Souders’s High Performance Websites (O’Reilly) remain a good reference point for examining the pages served by a site and identifying areas for improvement (see this page for a refresher). Google’s PageSpeed and Yahoo!’s YSlow will quickly grade a single page of your site and identify the highest-priority areas for improvement. For this chapter we’re going to assume you have a working grasp of the rules (cacheable headers, compression, minimizing HTTP requests, etc.) and, rather than discussing them, we’ll look at the challenges specific to developing Drupal websites when implementing those rules.

Limiting HTTP Requests

Drupal provides CSS and JavaScript aggregation via a configuration option. This allows potentially dozens of individual requests for CSS and JavaScript files to be reduced to just a few. While enabling this option in production should be one of the first steps you take to optimize frontend performance, there are several other steps you can take to minimize HTTP requests that require some more work on your part. Especially on mobile devices, or slow Internet connections in general, the number of HTTP requests can have the most serious negative ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449358013Errata PageSupplemental Content