After your initial installation of the Drupal content management system, the Drupal system may run much slower than it has to.  The default Drupal configurations (Apache, PHP, and MySQL) will most likely have important performance features turned off. Making a few adjustments can halve page load times and substantially speed up your web site.

Speed up a Drupal web site by enabling Drupal page caching. Drupal builds and rebuilds web pages for every site visitor. This takes time. You can speed up your site by enabling Drupal’s page cache which will allow Drupal to save and re-use built web pages.

1. Log in as your Drupal site’s administrator.
2. Go to the Administer » Site configuration » Performance page.
3. Check the Normal checkbox for the  Caching mode.
4. Set the Minimum cache lifetime to 1 day.
5. Click the Save configuration button

Speed up a Drupal web site by enabling CSS file aggregation. A Drupal theme and many of it’s modules have CSS files to style content. The more files there are, the longer it takes to send them to a site visitor. You can speed up your site by enabling Drupal’s CSS file aggregation to combine these files together into one large file, and to remove extra white-space and comments.

Speed up a Drupal web site by enabling block caching. Each block you add to a site design adds functionality, but it also adds time to query the block’s data from a database or the Internet and format it for the page. Some blocks take longer than others, slowing down your web site. Speed up some common types of slow blocks by replacing them with cached versions that are quicker to assemble into your site’s pages.

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