it's hard enough to book WP sites...

how can a single freelancer book Drupal projects?

I've had a few over the years, but it was mostly by luck!

any tips or suggestions short of "my uncle owns the business", "word of mouth" or "I work at NASA" advice?😅

had a client last month whose site went from like 2s to 9s load time over the past couple years. support kept telling them enable caching and it'll be fine. it wasn't.

spent a day actually digging instead of just throwing cache at it and found the real problems -

images were like 5mb+ per page, nobody ever compressed them. 23 modules installed that literally weren't being used anywhere on the site. hosting was still running an old php version, not really set up right for D11. and no cdn, so every single asset was hitting the origin server directly

fixed all of it over about a week, didn't even touch caching config in the end. once the actual bloat was gone the default caching handled everything fine

not the first time i've seen this either, feels like half the "why is my site slow" posts jump straight to caching or hosting when its actually just years of stuff nobody cleaned up

what do you guys usually check first when someone says their drupal site is slow