SiteGround SuperCacher for Drupal
Our SuperCacher has been around for several years now. It is an easy-to-use, yet powerful tool, which helps our customers improve the performance and loading speed of their websites. We are happy to announce that its most effective option – the dynamic cache, is now available for our Drupal users as well.
How Does it Work?
The dynamic cache option in our SuperCacher is based on a reverse proxy technology (currently NGINX). This means that once a page from your website is visited, it is stored in the RAM of your server. This way, when someone tries to visit the same page again, it will not be served by the much slower physical web server. Instead, it will be instantly displayed directly from the RAM. In addition to making your site loading time better, the reverse proxy also decreases the number of server requests that your website generates and this allows you to accommodate more traffic, while using more basic and affordable hosting plans.
Sounds great, right? Faster sites that cost less to host! The tricky part in dynamic caching, however, is to purge the cache whenever there is a change in your website’s content. For example, you want all user comments to be displayed instantly and you want the change you just made to become visible to the world right away, without the need to purge the cache manually. To make sure the cache is cleared automatically each time there is a change in your Drupal site content we’ve developed our own Drupal module that will take care of that.
How Fast is It?
The SuperCacher will significantly improve the loading speed of your website especially if you have large, dynamic pages. It eliminates the time that the PHP service requires to compile your output, as well as the time necessary for all MySQL queries to take place. The speed improvement, however, will vary depending on the particular structure of your website. For instance, a sample article with only a few paragraphs and an image that would load for approximately 0.8 seconds without the dynamic caching, starts loading for 0.5s after the service is enabled. For bigger pages, the difference is even more noticeable.
As someone, who spends a great deal of time optimizing websites for speed, my advice would be to benchmark your website, enable the dynamic SuperCacher for Drupal and then benchmark it again. You can do this with performance tools like GTMetrix and Pingdom.
Should You Use It?
Definitely! We’ve made the SuperCacher activation so easy and straightforward that it takes no more than a couple of minutes to enable it on your website. Check out our SuperCacher for Drupal Tutorial for more detailed information on how to install, enable and configure it.
