Creating a SharePoint site is the foundational step in developing the SharePoint environment in your organization. It’s a virtual place where all the related users can collaborate their work, leading to the optimum performance.

Microsoft provides a number of templates to create a new on-premises SharePoint or SharePoint Online site. A few examples are- Team site, Blog site, Project site, Community site, Document Center Site, Records Center Site, Business Intelligence (BI) Center Site, Search Center (Enterprise or Basic) Site, Publishing Site etc. All of these are useful to your organizations in their own manners. For instance, a blog site is the platform where people can post useful ideas or new information. The project site is set up to enact collaboration between people to work together on a project. Also, a community site can be created to discuss on customer issues.

Now, as most of your enterprise works are usually collaborative in nature, the SharePoint sites provides a foundational basis for the organizations. Thus, the performance of the entire enterprise is heavily dependent on the performance of the sites. Thus, ensuring its optimum performance is the key task of SharePoint administrators.

Here, we will discuss a few essential factors needed to improve the SharePoint site speed and performance:

1. Proper design:

The administrators should designed the SharePoint sites properly. The Site hierarchy provides by Microsoft is useful in this regard. The hierarchy contains three components, viz. Top-level Web site  , Subsite- a complete Web site stored as a subdirectory of the top-level Web site, and Site collection- a set of Web sites on a Web server, having the same owner and sharing administration settings.

For creating the sites, administrators should use default Site Templates – General and SharePoint Templates. General Templates produce very basic Web sites. They are useful if you wish to build a site from scratch. On the other hand, the SharePoint Templates are based on ASP.NET technology. These sites provide a powerful yet flexible support, which is essential for interactive and collaborative tasks in an organization.

Proper design facilitates the multi-tasking, and so contributes to server efficiency by simplifying the loads.

2. Image optimization

The speed of a webpage loading depends on various components, such as, images, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Images are a great way to communicate the information on the page. However, their size usually affect the performance. This demands for optimizing your images. A few techniques can be used in this regard are- image compression, image sprites etc. Further, with SharePoint image renditions feature, which allows you to use different dimensions of a single large image once uploaded.

3. Plan for geographically distributed deployments– While planning for SharePoint My Sites, the location of the users in the organization and the number of farms or User Profile service host applications must be taken into consideration judiciously.

4. Plan for storage requirements– My Site users regularly keep on doing tasks like, editing their profiles, generating newsfeed activities, uploading and downloading documents, etc. So, it’s useful to plan in advance for the storage and capacity needs of your environment. For that matter, the content databases for My Sites and the databases for the related services must be taken into consideration.

5. Properly use Navigation options– Structural navigation and search-driven navigation should be used properly to improve page load times. It should be worth noting that Global navigation and the queries required to build the structural navigation can make the pages load more slowly, as each query sends another request to SQL server. Further, more requests are made to SQL server for each site and subsite.

6. Use Content Search Web Part (CSWP) instead of Content Query Web Part (CQWP) – This CSWP uses the search index to quickly retrieve results which are shown to the user.

In contemporary business world, where most of the organizations are distributed in different geographical locations, and having different roles. However, for achieving the best productivity level, the collaborative SharePoint sites must function with the best speed and optimum performance. To know more on this, please click here