After several months of beta phase the old version of Südostschweiz has been replaced by the NP8 instance. We are pleased that the relaunch has been successful and therefore the first news portal based on Drupal 8 is fully productive. With 14 million hits in the last 7 days it is probably (one of) the biggest Drupal 8 sites in the world.

Impressive page load time speedup

In the upcoming weeks and months more features will be developed and added while improvements on performance and the website are made daily.

A comparison of performance between the old and the new website impressively shows the improvements regarding the loading time of the NP8 website and its server configuration on platform.sh including the CDN fastly.

The average loading time for an anonymous user was improved by a factor of 2.5 (from 10s to 4s). Users will be affected depending on their individual situation. For example, an anonymous user who visits the website for the first time can enjoy a five times faster response from the server. If the user visits other pages, the page load time in the browser is even faster because numerous elements are cached and don’t need to be loaded again.

Higher Google ranking

This has a big impact on the user experience (UX). A shorter download time means that the user is more happy and remains longer on site, because he does not need to constantly wait until the page has completely built. This also affects the user bounce rate. The result is already visible after one week: the bounce rate has been significantly improved and the average user visits one page more per visit.

For this reason, the page load time is also an important factor for Google. An improvement in this area will also result in an improvement in the Google ranking. Due to the fast response time of the system Google has temporarily indexed up to 600 pages per minute in the past few days.