For the first weeks after you launch your new store, you don't have to worry about your site performance, because you will have few visitors. As the days go by, you'll see that traffic increases. Maybe an advertisement or an article in the local newspaper will cause a peak in you site's visitors—are you sure that your store is prepared to handle it? In this section, you will see how to improve the performance of your website and make it work faster using less resources. Keep in mind though, that the selected theme may also affect the performance, if it has lots of layout images, JavaScript, or effects.
You can improve your site's performance just by altering the cache settings and by compressing important files. Go to Home | Administer | Site configuration | Performance.
On this screen, the following options are available:
Caching mode: When you enable caching, Drupal stores the latest version of your page and serves this to anonymous users. Using...