Cypress is ideal for testing Drupal content moderation, but the learning curve is rather steep. Well, with the cypress-json-tests package, you can be done within a couple of hours.
Fast for the people who need it most
Slower connections and older devices are more common among lower-income users and in regional and remote communities. For a site that serves everyone, speed is an inclusion issue as well as a technical one.
For the Australian Hydrographic Office, we optimised performance for mariners reading information at sea. For the PPSR website, we removed unused JavaScript and improved media delivery to cut load times.
What you get:
- Faster pages. Quick to load and quick to respond, on desktop and mobile.
- Room for traffic spikes. Caching that lets your site serve many visitors at once.
- Better search visibility. Page speed is a ranking factor, and Lighthouse scores track it.
Our approach to performance
Build fast on the server
Well-written code and the right database indexes can improve speed by orders of magnitude. Adding more hardware doesn't fix a slow algorithm. Recent PHP releases have also made Drupal noticeably snappier.
Cache at every layer
Drupal caches individual items, whole pages, and values held in memory. Reverse proxies such as Varnish and content delivery networks (CDNs) serve pages quickly to visitors around the world, and smart cache invalidation keeps content cached for as long as it's still current. GovCMS, Pantheon, and Acquia configure these layers for you.
Optimise what the browser receives
This is where visitors feel speed. For each site build, we use responsive images sized to the device, aggregate CSS and JavaScript to reduce requests, use HTTP/2 for more efficient downloads, avoid piling on JavaScript libraries, and avoid code that blocks the page from displaying or responding.
Measure with Lighthouse
We target Lighthouse scores of 100 across performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO on sites built with GovCMS and Convivial. Perfection isn't always possible, but it's worth aiming for.
Diagnose before you change platform
When a site is slow, we start with an audit. Common causes are unoptimised images, third-party scripts, inefficient code or queries, and poor caching, and most can be fixed without moving off Drupal.
Frequently asked questions
We target Lighthouse scores of 100 across performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO for sites on GovCMS and Convivial. That includes responsive images at the right resolution, optimised asset loading, tag-based cache purging, and page caching. For high-traffic government sites, we also advise on CDN configuration, Varnish caching, and database optimisation to keep performance steady under load.
A fast site is better for user experience, search rankings, and task completion. On a government site, slow pages mean people abandon forms or give up looking for information, which is a service failure, not only a technical inconvenience.
Common causes are unoptimised images, third-party scripts such as analytics and chat widgets, inefficient custom code or database queries, and inadequate caching. Most are fixable without changing platform, so a performance audit is the right first step, not blaming the CMS.
Slower connections and older devices are disproportionately common among lower-income users and some regional/remote communities. For a government site serving the whole population, performance is itself an inclusion issue, not just a technical metric.
Speed is how quickly a page loads. Scalability is how many visitors your site can serve at once. They're related, but not the same, and we plan for both.
Latest insights
Article
At DrupalCon Vienna, Marji’s talk showcased a production-grade DevOps setup built specifically for Drupal teams that need reliability, repeatability and automation across multiple environments.
Article
Each project brings its own challenges and learnings. Success comes from repeating the good, fixing the bad and avoiding the ugly. That's the theory anyway.
Article
IPEA is a government authority tasked with the management and reporting of parliamentarian expenditure. In this case study we will show how the Migrate and Solr modules were used to solve scalability and performance challenges by providing a user and editor friendly solution.