Is your Drupal website slowing? Does it hurt your SEO efforts? Not satisfied by the quality of the service you get? The website looks bad and doesn't do it's marketing work? Take the wheel back into your hands! A quality Drupal development management service will save you time and effort.
Each Drupal system is a different one. The specific issues which need to be checked on your system are unique as well. Some of them will only be decided during the test. However here is an initial checklist:
Performance
- Design
- Weight of pages.
- Number of external files per page.
- Compression of images and javascript.
- Image Sprites and CSS-level images.
- Other factors on the google page speed test.
- Database
- Find slow database queries
- Decide how to improve performance (Some strategies: adding indexes, removing modules, change mysql configuration paramters).
- Number of modules
- Hosting environment
Security
- Is Drupal core up to date?
- Are all modules up to date?
- Did you touch core + contrib code? Are those changes documented as patches which can be reapplied to the next version?
- Using Acquia Insignt to identify security issues and decide what to do with results.
Architecture
- Number of modules
- Do we need them all?
- Number of blocks
- Do we need them all in all site?
- Can move some of them to contexts to improve performance?
- Code review
- Is the custom code well-documented? Is it re-used?
- Is the custom code written according to standards?
- Is there a good separation between theme-level code and module-level code?
- Is it documented why each contributed module is essential?
- Is it documented what each custom module does?
- Are best practice modules (views, rules, context, …) used?
Development Process:
- Testing
- Do you have regression tests in place?
- Do you use the simpletest module?
- Version control:
- Do you use a version control system?
- And how do you control revisions on DB-based changes which are so common in Drupal?
There are more, specific items, to be discovered once we answer the questions above. Use https://www.acquia.com/products-services/acquia-network/cloud-services/i...">Acquia Insight (free for 30 days) to discover a lot more (http://youtu.be/wqEmL-ba1Ok">video) and interpret results.