Recently I had a few customers with performance issues and it helps to know what to expect with performance in Office 365.
So first of all I started with creating an empty page in SharePoint. I used traditional pages. So no modern pages yet.
I found that a blank page loads in about 2-3 seconds. So then I checked a standard SharePoint site with 2 web parts:
Now I’m on 4 seconds.
Then i added more web parts and I found that for each web part added it takes 0.5 seconds longer for the page to load. I’m talking about just standard SharePoint web parts here. SharePoint simply seems to wait for 0.5 seconds until the page starts to appear. So this is the time where your browser shows a white page.
So this gives us the following formula:
Where t is the expected page load time and n is the number of web parts on the page.
So why are my pages loading slower than that?
One reason could be your Structural Navigation. Another reason I found today is that when SharePoint can’t find a css file and a 404 is given there seems to be a loss of about 2 seconds. So check you console log for any error messages.
Do you have any more tips or tricks related to page load performance in SharePoint Online? feel free to leave a comment below.
[…] https://veenstra.me.uk/2017/10/30/office-365-sharepoint-online-performance-what-to-expect […]
Don’t put more than two layers of navigation.
Keep home pages as liye as possible.
Also look out for the tome to first byte in fiddles or browser developer tools. The longer that indicator is the more work the servers on Microsoft’s end are doing before the rendering even hits the client.
Consider things like client side SharePoint framework parts that can be deployed to geographic CDNS that can reduce time to load pages. Especially if your tenant is based outside your country.
SPFx is indeed one of my favourite solutions. Single Webpart Application Pages (SWAP) are great and my formula still applies.
Hi Pieter, I’ve also found that the number of JavaScript includes added to a page has quite the effect, so if your using something like Nintex forms, then adding rules onto that form and javascript functions can add a few more seconds to the load time
Indeed the more you do the longer it will take.