Recently quite a few of my customers have been complaining about performance of their SharePoint Online sites. Where home pages take about 8- 12 seconds to load. Even Microsoft Support just tells me that it is acceptable for pages to take 8 seconds to load.

Microsoft asked me to create a new site collection and then when these sites load fast will tell you that things work as expected.

But many production sites run slower:

Office 365 - SharePoint Online - Performance, how to gain 3-4 seconds Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft SharePoint Online 6secopnds

So what is the difference between an out of the box site collection and a production site. It took me a while to figure out. One of my colleagues showed me a pages that too 10 seconds to load even though there were only 2 out of the box web parts on the page.

The only other thing on the page was the navigation. Checking the navigation settings I found that the navigation was set to inherit from the parent site and the parent site was using Structural navigation.

When I broke the inheritance of the navigation the site loaded a lot faster. Then I enabled Managed Navigation on a single site and the page still loads fast.

Time to implement Managed Navigation using Waldek’s article across my site collections.

 

Uservoice

https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/16508059-improve-performance-of-structured-navigation-in-sh

 

 

 

By Pieter Veenstra

Business Applications and Office Apps & Services Microsoft MVP working as a Microsoft Productivity Principal Consultant at HybrIT Services. You can contact me using contact@veenstra.me.uk.

5 thoughts on “Office 365 – SharePoint Online – Performance, how to gain 3-4 seconds”
  1. I had the same support call with Microsoft. They even laughed at me for complaining that they find 8 seconds acceptable. They said: if you want faster page load, you should go on premise.

    1. Hi Kate, I don’t think that 8 seconds is acceptable. If you need any help improving the speed of your sites then feel free to contact me. I would consider moving towards the modern pages and SPFx web parts.

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