Web Optimization

Step by step guide to setup Apache Solr 5.x in CentOS 7 for Drupal 7 Panopoly distro using Search API

As of this writing, the latest version of Solr is 5.2.1. In this step by step guide we will install that version and integrate it with Drupal 7 Panopoly distro site using Search API module. Actually, Panopoly distro is already shipped with Search API and Search API Solr Search modules. All we need to do is to configure the pre-setup Search API Solr server and index. The good thing about using Search API is that it is already integrated with Views module and we can do unlimited customization with our search results.

How to setup a working Responsive Image in Drupal 8

Responsive Image module is a core module in Drupal 8 and this guide will show setting up this module with working example.

Steps:

  1. Enable the Responsive Image module at http://www.yoursite.com/admin/modules.

  2. We can use existing Breakpoint group but in this guide we will create our own Breakpoint group. It can be created as module or as theme and we will create this as module. Inside /modules folder of your Drupal 8 site, create a folder labelled as "site_optimization".

Implementing Nginx PageSpeed module's Shard domains with Drupal site

The web browsers by default limits number of concurrent connections for each host. When that limit exceeds, the resources (like CSS, images, etc.) will remain in queue waiting to be downloaded until the prior downloads are completed. This results slow page load times user experience. One solution to reduce page load time is by domain sharding. This technique splits the resources download across multiple sub-domains (eg. static1.webfoobar.com, static2.webfoobar.com) resulting an increase in simultaneous connections.

Using Pagespeed with Nginx

Pagespeed is a quick way to optimize your site following web best practices. It is available as a module for Apache and Nginx. Installing this module in Apache is easy as:


sudo yum install at # if you do not already have 'at' installed
sudo rpm -U mod-pagespeed-*.rpm

To install Nginx, we need to compile the Nginx source in order to include Pagespeed module (please see this article for instructions). For Nginx configuration, please follow this guide.

Setup ECC SSL for Nginx to satisfty Cloudflare Full SSL mode

Cloudflare's Full SSL mode encrypts the connection between your website visitors and CloudFlare also from CloudFlare to your server. This mode requires SSL certificate on your server. In this tutorial will show how to create SSL certificate on server and configure Nginx for SSL.

The following procedures are tested on my Linode server running Centos 7 64-bit Linux distribution.

Setup Nginx as web server and as reverse proxy for Apache with Virtualmin support

We know that Nginx is more faster than Apache and most of us prefer to replace Apache with Nginx as their web server. Nginx is known to serve faster static content and run with less RAM. As of this writing, Virtualmin supports Apache as its web server. To take advantage of Nginx, we will install it as reverse proxy for Apache and continue using Virtualmin to manage your domains (Note: this article will assume that the Nginx and Apache are running on same server).

How to setup Memcache on CentOS 7 for Drupal site

One way to optimize the authenticated users experience in Drupal site is to use Memcache. It works between the database and Drupal. Typically the queries are cached in the database but with Memcache the queries sent from Drupal to database are intercepted by Memcache and it serves them from RAM and this avoid hits to the disk or database. We see often that half of the queries are served by Memcache and we are looking significant improvement in authenticated users hits.