Performance Optimising SharePoint Sites – Part 1

For anyone involved in delivering public facing websites, particularly for an international audience, minimising page load times would have to be something high on the agenda. While this subject is not limited to sites hosted on SharePoint, it is an essential topic for consideration for any SharePoint project. There is somewhat of a misperception that SharePoint is inherently slow and often becomes the primary target of blame when trying to work out why page load times aren’t to an acceptable standard. The simple fact is there are a number of optimisation techniques available to be leveraged to minimise page load times.

These topics are not only relevant to public facing websites – a number of them are applicable to intranets and extranets experiencing performance issues. My personal experience in this field stems from delivering a number of public facing websites to specific performance targets. My initial exposure to optimising SharePoint sites came working with the team at Tourism WA on the famous SharePoint site westernaustralia.com and most recently in the early stages of a site optimisation phase for the Career Centre website.

Ideally site optimisation would be a major consideration at the beginning of any project and planned for accordingly. Realistically due to tight deadlines and more functional concerns it’s often a task carried out in retrospect. Either way performance optimisation for your SharePoint site should be considered a crucial task and one that is always undertaken – this article will approach the topic from a retrospective viewpoint.

Part 1 of this series will focus on some of the first steps you should undertake or consider when embarking on performance optimising your SharePoint site. Performance Optimising SharePoint Sites – Part 2 will explore some of the platform-independent techniques available at your disposal while Performance Optimising SharePoint Sites – Part 3 will identify some of the SharePoint-specific techniques able to be leveraged.

Understand the importance of Performance Optimisation

There is a strong correlation between page load times and the success of a website. There is plenty of anecdotal and statistically-backed evidence littered throughout the net to prove this. For a few examples take a look at How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line, how Amazon increased revenue for every 100ms of improvement and how ShopZilla increased revenue and page views by reducing load time. Page load times have also been known to influence bounce rates and improve traffic as testified by Google’s Marissa Mayer in Speed Wins. It should be obvious, but with evidence to back it up the likelihood of being granted the time and money to perform optimising tasks should improve.

Establish Benchmarks

In my opinion an important step to undertake before beginning work on optimising a SharePoint website is to establish the performance benchmarks for the site and ideally have a performance target in mind. This works on 2 levels; firstly, having an understanding of the current traffic levels of the site is important. The ultimate goal of performance optimisation is to increase traffic, improve the amount of time spent on the site and if applicable increase conversions. Using a free tool such as Google Analytics may give you the information you need or you can explore a raft of paid options which exist. Secondly you need to capture the current performance of the website. There are a couple of free tools available to do this including Web Page Test and Page Speed Online. With these pieces of information in hand you will be able to accurately determine if the work carried out has had a meaningful influence on both the performance and effectiveness of your site and will increase the likelihood of being able to carry out these tasks in the future.

Know the Tools at your Disposal

There are a number of tools out there that either help identify the areas in which performance optimisation can be implemented, help perform the optimisation tasks themselves or offer somewhat of a shortcut to having to dedicate hours of time on performance optimisation at all. The performance benchmarking tools mentioned above not only rate and measure performance but also offer advice on how your pages can be improved. Tools such as ySlow and Fiddler give you a more granular view of what’s going on as your page loads and with a bit of knowledge lets you target areas for improvement. If you’re hosting your site on SharePoint 2010 then you can make use of the Developer Dashboard to analyse the performance of your page. Products such as Aptimize exist which was famously used on Microsoft’s SharePoint.com to improve performance. Finally, Content Delivery Networks can be leveraged to greatly improve international load times of your site (in my personal experience it was Akamai’s CDN that proved the silver bullet for meeting performance targets on westernaustralia.com).

In Performance Optimising SharePoint Sites – Part 2 of this series i’ll explore some of the platform-independent techniques available at your disposal.