Basic performance tips

In the administration area under Configuration | Development | Performance we have a few performance options:

We can cache pages for anonymous users and blocks within our site. This takes a copy of the content and stores it outside of our database—either in the server's memory or on the file system. This reduces the work the server has to do to load these pages. We can also instruct Drupal to aggregate and compress our CSS and our JavaScript files, so that when a user visits our site, those files are generated and downloaded quicker, with fewer HTTP requests, helping to slightly reduce the load that our server is under.

Introduction to caching and caching options

Caching systems can reduce the number of database and file system requests the website makes when our users access it, by storing commonly used data in the system's memory (this is known as caching).

When we needed to access the contents of a commonly used file or frequently accessed database record, the information...