Performance profiling allows you to see an overview of how your Drupal application stacks up against your users' needs and business requirements. A good profile will help you understand where the performance bottlenecks are and where you should focus your efforts in order to achieve the best results when optimizing your application.

There are many profiling tools available to help you analyze your Drupal site's performance. Some are free -- like the browser’s built-in development tools, the Lighthouse Chrome extension, and XHProf. Some are paid -- like New Relic, Blackfire, and other profiling SaaS solutions.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Outline the general concepts and goals of performance profiling
• List some available profiling tools and their features

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to describe what performance profiling is, and list the tools commonly used to establish a performance profile for a Drupal site.

When your site is experiencing performance issues, one way to pinpoint the cause is to use profiling tools. Before you can fix the issue you have to be able to identify what's causing it. All profiling tools do roughly the same thing: they tell you what code is called during the request and how much time is spent executing it. This helps to identify the slowest code and dig deeper into the cause. Once the cause is determined you can start figuring out how to optimize the code.

For this tutorial, we’ll use New Relic as a profiling tool, but you can apply a similar methodology using the profiling tool of your choice.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• Learn how to identify and analyze slow transactions
• Look at common things to check for while profiling
• Cover some questions you should ask when looking at profiling data to help track down the slow code

By the end of this tutorial, you should know how to profile a Drupal site (specifically with New Relic) to find performance bottlenecks.

No one likes to wait for a slow site to load. Not me, not you, and definitely not search engines. And the effect of site load times on things like SEO, user bounce rates, purchase intent, and overall satisfaction are only going to become more pronounced over time.

Drupal is a modern web framework that is capable of serving millions of users. But every site is unique, and while Drupal tries hard to be fast out of the box, you'll need to develop a performance profile, caching strategy, and scaling plan that are specific to your use case in order to be truly blazing fast.

Drupal site performance depends on multiple components, from hardware setup and caching system configuration to contributed modules, front-end page weight, and CDNs. Experienced Drupal developers looking to optimize their applications know where to start looking for potential savings. They can manipulate settings and combinations of these components to achieve the desired results. Our goal with this set of tutorials is to help explain the process and provide you with the insight that comes with experience.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Introduce high-level performance concepts for Drupal that we'll then cover in more detail elsewhere
• Provide an overview of the main Drupal performance components.

By the end of this tutorial, you should understand what components around your Drupal application are responsible for site performance.

This guide was written, and is maintained, by Drupalize.Me. For more high quality written and video Drupal tutorials created by our team of experts, check out the collection of Drupalize.Me Guides.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path to upgrade from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11, but there is a set of common tasks that everyone will need to complete.

In this tutorial we’ll:

• Explain the differences between Drupal 10 and Drupal 11 that affect the upgrade path.
• Walk through the high-level steps required to upgrade from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11.
• Provide resources to help you create an upgrade checklist and start checking items off the list.

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to:

• Explain the major differences between Drupal 10 and 11.
• Audit your existing Drupal 10 projects for Drupal 11 readiness, and estimate the level of effort involved.
• Start the process of upgrading your site from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11.

Drupal recipes provide a new way to package and share reusable features across Drupal sites. Unlike traditional install profiles or distributions, recipes are applied once to add functionality and then step out of the way, leaving you with a standard Drupal site that you can customize freely.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Understand what Drupal recipes are and how they differ from install profiles and distributions
• Learn the four core properties that make recipes powerful: applied (not installed), shareable, non-locking, and composable
• Explore real-world scenarios where recipes solve common platform and agency challenges

By the end of this tutorial you'll be able to explain what Drupal recipes are, identify features in your projects that are good candidates for recipes, and articulate the value of recipes to stakeholders.

Recipes transform your Drupal site by adding features and configuration. After downloading (or authoring) a recipe it needs to be applied to your Drupal project. This is analogous to following the step-by-step instructions in a recipe to make a dish. Only, we're not performing the steps on our own, but instead we're using Drupal's tools to apply the recipe. Applying the recipe adds its features to your Drupal project. This requires establishing safe workflows to apply recipes, verify their effects, and roll back changes if needed.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Apply a recipe in a non-production environment using a feature branch workflow.
• Review configuration changes using Git and verify functionality in the UI.
• Understand how to roll back recipe changes if needed.
• Learn safe workflows for both developers and non-developers.

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to safely apply recipes to your projects, review their impact, and decide whether to keep or roll back the changes.

The built-in config actions in Drupal core cover most common scenarios. But sometimes you need custom operations specific to your feature or the configuration your module relies on. You can create custom config actions by defining them as plugins or by adding PHP attributes to a configuration entity class's methods. Let's implement a custom config action to toggle an SEO strict mode setting to learn how to extend recipes with domain-specific configuration operations and make them reusable across your projects.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Identify scenarios where custom config actions are warranted.
• Understand the two implementation patterns: plugins and attributed methods.
• Implement a custom config action in a module.

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to implement custom config actions that extend the configuration API provided to your recipes, making platform-specific operations reusable and declarative.

The Configuration Actions API lets recipes modify existing configuration rather than just adding new configuration. By extending the SEO Article recipe created in a previous tutorial with config actions, you'll learn how to manipulate existing configuration objects in order to do things like grant permissions and modify entity display modes. This is necessary because sometimes a recipe needs to modify configuration that already exists on the site, not just add new configuration.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Add config actions to grant permissions to existing roles
• Modify entity displays using config actions
• Reapply recipes and observe idempotent behavior
• Experiment with new content types to understand recipe limitations

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to use common config actions in your recipes and understand how recipes behave when reapplied.

The Configuration Actions API is a powerful feature of Drupal recipes that allows you to modify existing configuration without replacing it entirely. While configuration exports let you add new configuration, config actions let you update what's already there—like granting permissions to an existing role or adjusting display settings. Effectively, config actions are a way for a recipe to declare a PHP method to run on a configuration object during recipe application and any arguments that method needs to run.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Understand what config actions are
• Learn how to read and write config actions in a recipe's YAML file
• Explore common patterns like granting permissions and modifying displays
• Understand the difference between generic and type-specific actions

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to read config actions in recipes, understand when to use them versus configuration exports, and recognize common config action patterns.

Creating your own recipes lets you package and reuse features across your projects. By building a simple SEO-focused recipe from scratch, you'll learn what goes into a recipe, how to declare dependencies, and how to test your work.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Understand what belongs in a recipe versus what belongs in modules
• Create a recipe structure with proper metadata and dependencies
• Export and package configuration into a recipe
• Test the recipe by applying it to a second site

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to create your own recipes, package them properly with dependencies, and apply them to other Drupal sites.