Two important features that every business needs are scalability and security. Scalability will make their website adapt quickly to heavy traffic and give users a superior experience. Security will ensure impregnable defenses from current and upcoming threats. Every web development project must prioritize these two factors.
Drupal is well-known for empowering websites with high scalability and security. Thus, many businesses choose Drupal website development when they develop a new website or redesign an existing one.
But did you know that you can improve them further? Drupal provides the necessary tools, features and functionalities to enhance website security and scalability. So contact your in-house team of Drupal developers to explore them further. You can also partner with a professional website development company to benefit from these features. In the meantime, let us explore these concepts one by one.
The Need For Scalability In Drupal Custom Website Development
Statistics show that Drupal is rapidly gaining popularity for building websites and web apps. As a CMS or content management system, Drupal is extremely versatile. Drupal comes equipped with different scalability-enhancing features and tools. But how does Drupal help websites scale efficiently to handle incremental traffic, user interactions, and content volumes?
Drupal improves website scalability through
- Caching mechanisms
- Content delivery networks or CDNs
- Database optimizations
- Content architecture
- Load balancing
- Horizontal scaling etc.
We will explore each option individually so you can maximize your gains when investing in Drupal custom website development.
Caching Mechanisms
- Page caching: A rendered version of the web pages is saved primarily as static HTML files either on the server or a CDN. Whenever a query is raised for these pages, you can serve them from here instead of dynamically generating them every time, reducing the load on the server and speeding up page loading.
- Block caching: Here, individual blocks present on a web page are cached to make the caching more granular and improve performance speed.
- Views caching: Present as a Views Module, this is a powerful tool for building and displaying dynamic content listings based on customized queries. The results of these queries are stored temporarily and served when you make the same query again.
Content Delivery Networks
- Distributing static assets across a global server network increases website scalability and performance.
- Provides content from servers located near the geographical location of the user, reducing server load and latency.
- Drupal’s easy interaction with CDNs allows its easy management directly from Drupal’s UI.
- Combining CDNs with available caching options boosts website speed further.
Database Optimisation
- Drupal website developers ensure the quick execution of database queries by optimizing databases. This increases the overall efficiency of the website.
- Here, frequently requested data is precisely and accurately indexed to improve query efficiency, responsiveness, and scalability.
- Implementing database replication divides read-intensive workloads and spreads them across multiple replicas to improve website scalability.
Content Architecture
- Reduce database bloat and optimize content retrieval by simplifying your website’s content types and fields during Drupal CMS web development.
- Here, developers have the flexibility to customize content types based on specific purposes. This removes all extraneous fields and maintains website efficiency even during content volume spikes.
- Taxonomy optimization in Drupal allows developers to leverage taxonomy vocabularies and keywords and use them for content categorization and organization. This simplifies website navigation and improves search functionality effectiveness, improving UX and scalability.
Load Balancing
- Drupal web developers distribute incoming web traffic across different servers to eliminate the chances of overload.
- Drupal’s load balancers are supported by numerous web servers. This further helps boost website availability and scalability by smartly spreading incoming requests, reducing server downtime possibilities, maximizing resource utilization, and eliminating performance deterioration.
- Drupal is a favorite for responsive web applications because it is extremely dependable and provides consistent UX across devices, browsers, and platforms.
Horizontal Scaling
- Clustering allows a Drupal website development service provider to spread out website load and boost its capacity by grouping web and database servers and other components.
- Drupal’s elastic infrastructure allows dynamic demand-based scalability by using cloud computing platforms like Azure, Google Cloud and AWS.
Performance Monitoring And Optimisation
- Drupal websites need continuous monitoring. Insights gathered into its performance and resource utilization help finetune website capabilities to ensure optimal scalability without impacting performance.
- Tools like the Devel Module, XHProf, Blackfire.io, etc, are a part of Drupal’s ecosystem. They allow developers to facilitate proactive performance management, enhancing the efficiency and scalability of your website.
Content Delivery Optimisation
- Lazy loading of scripts, pictures and assets helps boost perceived speed.
- Minification and compression help reduce CSS and JavaScript file sizes.
- Gzip compression also facilitates swift delivery by reducing file sizes further.
- Content aggregation lowers the number of HTTP requests by grouping JavaScript and CSS files.
A custom website development company can empower Drupal websites with capabilities for improved performance even while experiencing web traffic spikes by adopting the above optimizations.
Drupal Website Security: How Custom Website Development Firms Can Achieve It
Security features within Drupal’s core play a critical role in its popularity as a CMS. Many well-known government organizations, corporations, and institutions like UNESCO, Pfizer, University of Toronto, etc., trust Drupal CMS for its security.
Drupal’s dedicated security team proactively ensures that safeguards are in place even before cyber threats materialize. These practices allow users to counter the most sophisticated cyberattacks. Before we look at these practices and safeguards, let us quickly look at the potential security risks all websites face today.
Mostly all CMSs are vulnerable to security risks like:
- Cross-sire scripting(XSS)
- Authentication Bypass
- Remote code execution(RCE)
- SQL Injection
- Cross-site request forgery(CSRF)
Counter these challenges by implementing the following security best practices. Each of these will help strengthen the Drupal security ecosystem proactively.
Staying Up-To-Date
Drupal is backed by a very efficient and dedicated community of developers. They keep developing Drupal upgrades to help websites counter future security threats. Hence, companies offering Drupal CMS web development services must update all client Drupal websites to take advantage of the patches and fixes that the Drupal developers come up with. This will help plug vulnerability loopholes and fortify website security.
Further, companies can also take advantage of the Drupal security team’s weekly security advisories by:
- Subscribing to their e-newsletters
- Joining their Slack group
- Following all RSS feeds
Remember that staying on top of Drupal’s security updates is a cost-effective way to strengthen your cyber-defence mechanism. Some recent security updates already published by Drupal include:
- Automated logout
- CAPTCHA
- Content access permissions
- Password policy updates
- Security kit or SecKit
- Two-factor authentication or 2FA
If these updates have not been installed, do them immediately. They will help keep your website protection updated for upcoming cyberattacks.
Drupal Website Backups
In case of a website breach, restoring the backup can help minimize damage. Hence, it is important to ensure regular and frequent backups of the Drupal core, its attendant themes and modules, and all other application files. Having them as a backup will allow you to recover quickly in the unfortunate instance of a cyberattack.
Obtaining The SSL Certification
The Secure Sockets Layer or SSL certification ensures website authenticity. All SSL-certified websites can enable encrypted connections that secure user credentials. Without this, user credentials and other sensitive data are under constant risk. They can be intercepted and sent as cleartext over the internet very easily.
This line of interception gets broken when a website obtains SSL certification because SSL uses symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. This means that even if your data is intercepted, the hacker will get it in a highly jumbled form, making it useless for the hacker.
Additionally, SSL certification has certain performance and SEO benefits. Discuss this with your partnering Drupal website development company to take advantage of it.
Strengthen The HTTP Security Headers
Some HTTP headers are related to security. But some perform other functions also. For example, some HTTP headers tell a browser how the different operations that can be done on your website should be governed. These HTTP headers help fortify a Drupal website and safeguard it from clickjacking and man-in-the-middle or MITM attacks.
Some recommended HTTP headers that every Drupal website must integrate include:
- Content-security policy or CSP
- Strict-transport-security
- X-frame-options
- Public-key-pins
- X-XSS-protection
Make sure to implement them from the beginning of your Drupal CMS web development.
Secure File Permissions
In Drupal, many different user roles can be defined, such as administrators, editors, anonymous users, etc. Drupal is so flexible that it allows each user group to be assigned different permissions based on their roles. Some roles might require extensive permissions, some will need limited read permissions and others may be privileged accounts. Drupal recommends applying the POLP or Principle of Least Privilege.
What is POLP? It is an information security standby that suggests that users should have only those permissions that are required for them to complete a task. This includes user access to a website’s resources, data, and connected apps. Such role-based access sets limits and cuts down on the number of random users that can access and harm your Drupal website.
Input Sanitization
This is extremely useful against XSS and SQL injections and involves the removal of all unsafe characters from user inputs like passwords, usernames, etc. Developers can integrate input validation logic or functions in their codes to enable this. Input sanitization also gives user inputs a specific format that allows it to be added to the database.
Some Additional Recommendations
No amount of security measures implemented can make your website safe enough. In addition to those mentioned above, integrate the following security features to fortify the website.
Additional Drupal website security considerations:
- An IP firewall
- Distributed denial-of-service or DDoS protection
- Bot manager
This will close all loopholes and gaps present in your Drupal website security. Further, judge the viability of the security measures integrated by conducting a third-party security audit.
Conclusion
There are numerous ways to enable scalable and secure Drupal website development. However, it is important that these measures be correctly implemented to maximize their efficiency. Since these features will significantly impact user experience and the reputation of the company, they must not be overlooked.
