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By drupal_lover85 on
So I have a project of building a website that will be promoted to attract very large traffic. As a content management system , is Drupal suited to big websites that get large amount of traffic like craigslist ?? Some people told me that CMS solutions are too heavy for big websites and that the best solution is to write a website from scratch if I intend to market the site and attract huge traffic. I'd appreciate your input on this. I am planning to build a project similar to this classified ads website but with drupal. I wonder if drupal is the right solution for this. It may help speed up development but I don't want to experience setbacks in the future. Your feedbacks are most welcome.
Comments
The White House and Al
The White House and Al Jazeera both use Drupal.
That should answer your question.
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not to mention weather.com, grammy.com (imagine all the media traffic on grammy nite), emmys.com, syfy.com, economist.com, examiner.com, many of the sony music sites, ncaa.com (imagine that one during march madness), popsci.com, nasa.gov, etc, etc, etc...
That doesn't even go into all the edu sites like harvard, stanford, etc.
There is the proviso that any
There is the proviso that any Drupal site but especially a large one should start with some consultancy and planning by a person or team who have Drupal experience on sites as big as, or at least broadly comparable with, the site to be built. Building and hosting a large site in Drupal without hiring some Drupal-specialist input is a recipe for disaster.
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
Yeah, that's a good point.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Drupal *can* be used for large sites, but if the site is built by a developer without significant experience developing with Drupal, a site receiving a large amount of traffic will likely be quite slow.
I think the page loading
I think the page loading speed and website traffic endurance are mostly affected the hosting service you choose. Besides, as Drupal has been used by some large business portals and even governmental site, it is absolutely great for large websites.
Big mistake to think this
"I think the page loading speed and website traffic endurance are mostly affected the hosting service you choose."
No offense, but it's a big mistake to think this. Or at least to think only this. I have worked on many installations of Drupal over the past 8 years and there are many Drupal sites running on great hosting services that are not performant.
The biggest determinant of whether a Drupal site is slow is the level of importance the team puts on performance. Many people say that performance is importance but the actions of the team are not congruent with that.
When performance is important (as opposed to, say, getting something up as quickly as possible), regular performance testing takes place throughout the life of the project. This allows the team to understand which actions slow the system down before they build out the entire site only to discover that it isn't providing the page load times they want.
Going back and reworking the site later to speed it up is several times more costly than testing and making course corrections along the way.
Insightful post, as a Drupal
Insightful post, as a Drupal novice i've heard a lot about the significance of experience and development in making an efficient website. Out of curiosity and to help better explain can you give some real world examples of bad practises that would make a website perform slower or good practises that would help a website be more efficient in high traffic?
Thank you
Performance
Basics:
Use an external cache to serve anonymous users when possible. Examples are the Boost module (which saves completed pages as HTML files), Varnish, and Squid. These solutions avoid PHP, Drupal and the database entirely if the page is in the cache. Major sites, such as the aforementioned whitehouse.gov, do this. Quality, performance-oriented hosting services, such as Pantheon, provide this functionality.
Use a PHP opcode cache to accelerate PHP.
Move Drupal's caches (it does a LOT of caching internally) to memory using memcache.
None of this substitutes for a focus on performance throughout the design and development process, and there are plenty of ways to screw it up, but these three basics will go a long way toward performance and scalability.
Thank you, wonderful insight,
Thank you, wonderful insight, appreciated
Drupal for content-heavy websites
Developing and managing a content-heavy website can be tough and challenging, whether it is a government website or e-commerce platform. There are always problems that can affect your site’s loading time, popularity, and overall user experience. It is crucial to choose the right CMS in order to mitigate these issues and create a perfect website.
Drupal is the right choice here. It provides a flexible and extensive module structure, great database support and security guarantee. That is why many world-famous websites are based on Drupal.