At Wall Street Oasis[1], we’ve noticed that every time we focus on improving our page speed, Google sends us more organic traffic. In 2018, our company's website reached over 80 percent of our traffic from organic search. That’s 24.5 million visits. Needless to say, we are very tuned in to how we can continue to improve our user experience and keep Google happy.
We thought this article would be a great way to highlight the specific steps we take to keep our page speed lightning fast and organic traffic healthy. While this article is somewhat technical (page speed is an important and complex[2] subject) we hope it provides website owners and developers with a framework on how to try and improve their page speed.
Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal[3] CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and memcache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or a reverse proxy.
Ready? Let’s dig in.
5 Steps to speed up the backend
Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend”. You can think of the backend of everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps make the website function that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between the backend vs. frontend, you read this article
[4]
Step 1: Make sure you have a Reverse Proxy configured
This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we