Why does speed matter?

"At Google, we've gathered hard data to reinforce our intuition that 'speed matters' on the Internet." - Jake Brutlag, Data Analyst at Google

On the internet, speed matters. A lot.

If you run an e-commerce site, slow-downs directly hurt sales by keeping your consumers from your products. For content or community sites slowness can be infuriating, decreasing the reach and effectiveness of important messages.

And what happens when you are successful? The more users that try to access your content, the more burdened your server will be. Falling down under a traffic spike is a huge missed opportunity. Plan for the future to avoid becoming a victim of your own success.

This is especially crucial when developing sites with Drupal. The range of available functionality is amazing and powerful, but every new feature introduces new complexity, inevitably impacting performance.

This is why we are so excited about the future of Drupal when paired with Mercury. While there is no "silver bullet" for scalability, it does deliver break-through performance, especially in handling spikes. This will help keep Drupal extremely competitive on the internet when it comes to performance.