The third month of the year arrived - and A&M Consult have been super busy working on demos for clients, and doing stationery design work. April will bring with it a major site re-design, and some Social Networking ideas we've seen recently. 

In the mean time, as big Drupal supporters, we've decided to give you some advice on how to speed up your site. Many people have problems with slow loading Drupal pages - as Drupal is a database system, that often generates a page on the spot (by communicating with a big almighty database) it can often render pages very slowly. Try these out to speed things up:

• Increase your PHP memory limit. Maybe a particular element of your page requires some extra memory to get going, or a particular block uses memory everytime its loaded on a page. This will give you more memory to play with
• Tweak your Performance settings. Investigate settings under Administration > Site Configuration > Performance. Optimise as much as possible and if compatible with enabled moduled, enable caching. As long as your theme is not being regularly updated, this will help users who regularly visit your site
• Invest in a higher-end hosting package. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all host out there. Shop around for a hosting package that will increase the bandwidth you have and speed up requests to your server. The more modules you have enabled, the more demand on your server. On the whole, big domain companies like GoDaddy and 1&1 offer very good, fast hosting packages.
• Throttle some modules. If you know the particular module that is causing problems, enable the Throttle module (Administer > Site building > Modules) and throttle it. This will prevent it from slowing the experience down for all of your users

Otherwise, contact us for a few more pointers or your current services provider for server specific advice.

Enjoy March!