Key Factors to Improve SEO & Performance for Your Drupal Website

In the dynamic digital landscape, the journey of a digital product or service might begin from different angles, but everything converges on user experience. This is another major reason why Digital transformation across industries is at a peak and will continue to be so in the near future. 

However, with digital transformation, the buck doesn’t stop just at implementation. It is the continuous optimization of the website's health parameters that ensure a productive journey for the businesses. Among many such parameters, SEO and Performance are vital. A snag in any of these directly impacts the user experience.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is certainly not a recent development. It has been here for the longest period of time and every organization has its set of strategies and people to keep up the SEO health of its website. According to a report, 61% of marketers named SEO as a top marketing priority in 2022. With SEO, an organization expands its visibility via organic search results. Thus, SEO and its optimization make perfect sense for any business right from the start. 

Similarly, when interacting with a site, performance indicators like site loading speed, scrolling, and content layout extra play a massive role in determining the user’s experience with the site and by extension with the brand.

These factors play an important role in your business to increase the chance for more conversions, which ultimately leads to more customers and more revenue. But there’s no cookie-cutter solution to find out what works best for your business. It is about strategizing, implementing, monitoring, and managing periodically to keep up the performance. In this blog, we explore a few key factors that help you improve your site's SEO & performance. 

Improving SEO for Drupal site

• Integrating the Metatag module: so that Meta descriptions are found on every page. A lack of which decreases the SEO score. One can also provide default tokens. 

• Adding an organization-structured schema for all the content types. This helps in improving the search engine rankings and also provided rich results. 

• Installing and configuring the Sitemap module: provides a sitemap for the entities. Along with that, handling the sitemap map settings for media improves performance. 

• Creating clean and user-friendly URLs: for all the content types and configuring them for the website. Moreover, the old URLs are required to be redirected. 

• Adding alt text for all the images. An empty ALT text decreases the SEO score, as well as ALT text, is very helpful for screen readers.

• Integrate valid robots.txt on the site: it helps crawlers to understand which pages should be crawled.

• Adding a valid hreflang code: as it helps search engines to understand the language and region of the website. Also, it helps google to understand if the website is multilingual. This adds to the user experience as they can now access a page in their local languages. If appropriate hreflang is provided, it will not consider it has duplicate content. 

• Links should have descriptive text:  all the links should have descriptive text else it lowers the SEO score. It should describe what happens when the user clicks it.
• Integrating the accessibility and best practices as well as fixing them when required to keep up the SEO and performance ratings of the site.

Improving Performance for Drupal site

• Using passive listeners to improve scrolling performance: User scrolling through a wide range of products or services on a  website. Sometimes the touch might not feel anchored to the page. It is because of Touch event listeners. Generally, browsers are incapable of knowing if a touch event listener is going to cancel the scroll. So they always wait for the listener to finish before scrolling the page. This is also called score jank. Using a passive event listener solves this problem and improves the user’s experience.
• Ensuring an efficient cache policy: A website should have a cache maximum age to reduce the server load by reducing the number of requests per page.

• Improving loading laziness for the media assets: Businesses need to load images asynchronously. By doing this, images will load when the viewport appears and thus this reduces the initial page load and also helps them to improve the LCP for the page and conserve the user’s bandwidth.
• Fixing image fonts: Implementing webp images provides better compression for the images resulting in better load times and uses less storage.
• Fixing broken links and unused files: A periodic audit of broken links is critical. All the broken links require to be handled and help gain SEO ratings. Similarly, your website has core JS and CSS files, which are needed for authenticated users only. It is important that such files are not attached to the anon users and only to the authenticated users. With the right user attachment, the additional unused JavaScript and CSS  assets can be removed. This overall reduces the load time of the website as well as file size and helps improve the performance score in general. 
  
• Optimizing Cumulative Layout Shift by adding height and width to all the images and videos. It adds symmetry to a page and ensures a pleasant viewing experience for the end users as well. 
• Ensure text remains visible during the Webfont load: Sometimes text is not visible until font files load. This causes an issue of “flash of invisible text". The system font can be used to display the text immediately and thus does not impact the FCP and LCP scores as well. Moreover, all the links should have descriptive text. Else, it lowers the SEO score. The link text should be able to describe what will happen if the user clicks on it. 
• Using  CDN: to deliver high bandwidth content to the user for serving them cached content from the edge locations
• Using breakpoints and responsive image modules: to render different image styles based on the screen size using pictures. This also improves the overall load time and reduces bandwidth consumption.
• Remove unused modules and themes
• Enable Fast 404 module: 404 requests are very memory intensive and drupal requires a full bootstrap. This slows down the website. The fast 404 module will help in delivering 404 pages in less than 1 MB for the server.
• Profile slow pages using Xhprof. Xprof is the profiling tool for the PHP code. It has the capability to collect information regarding memory usage, CPU usage & elapsed time at the function level.

While these factors are important, they would need a certain amount of technical prowess to identify and fix. Thus, businesses should look for a partner who has the knowledge and expertise to take up these issues. At the same time, they should be collaborative enough to understand your concerns and problem statement. That’s where we come in. We can help you strategize and fix these factors your business needs. Let’s get talking!