Since being released, the Salesforce Lightning Experience has proven itself a worthy competitor to the Classic version of Salesforce. However, as a client-side base platform, slow load speeds have been relatively common for users making the transition. We want to offer some thoughts and tips on how to optimize your Lightning environment to improve load speeds and create a better platform for both your users and clients.
As stated above, the bulk of Lightning is centered around the client-side of things. Client-side focused means adding on various elements can impact page load speeds (especially for detail and record page layout). It’s essential to keep this in mind when you’re customizing the platform. Here are some ways you can pick up the pace:
- Reducing Fields: When setting up Lightning, users often have some 100-200 fields on the page, and this can lead to slow load speeds. Take some time to evaluate which fields are critical and reduce fields to what your clients will need.
- Related Lists: Active related lists can get bulky, so another way to speed things up is by minimizing the number of these on the page. Again, keep what you need, but get rid of the rest. Additionally, you might want to consider supplementing your related lists with related quick links. Related quick links allow users to access the information they need, but doesn’t require all the data to load onto the page.
- Disable unnecessary Plug-ins: Depending on the CPU power/memory resources, your plug-ins and extensions use, you may have to disable some of them. Evaluate and test the plug-ins/extensions in your environment to troubleshoot which ones are causing slow speeds and then act accordingly.
- List Views, Reports, and Dashboards: To speed up the loading of list views, reports, and dashboards, avoid filtering by formula fields. Also, you should always try to filter by relevant date ranges so as not to query all records all the time (unless absolutely necessary). By filtering for date range, you’ll get faster results on filters for this year, Record Type, or any other picklist field. Also, when filtering on picklist or text fields, your results will query faster when you use “Equals” rather than “Contains.”
Update your browser. This tip might be a given, but it comes up more often than you’d expect. With Lightning, the browser does most of the heavy lifting, which means having an up-to-date browser is necessary for quick load speeds. Along those same lines, you might also consider the following:
- Stable Internet Connection: As a business user, a reliable internet connection is a must for your team. Again, Lightning relies on the browser and a reliable internet connection will be detrimental to the success of your Lightning integration. If necessary, switch to a different browser (for example, Salesforce notes that Chrome has performed more consistently than Internet Explorer). Just as well, ensure that the devices your team is on support the high CPU usage required to run Lightning. You can also do an Octane evaluation of your client’s devices to assess their browser processing capabilities.
- Restart Your Browser: It’s essential to maintain a consistent schedule for restarting your browser. Frequently, this helps limit the amount of devices/browser applications that are causing load speeds. By freeing up your resources, your operating system will work more efficiently and give more power to your Lightning Experience application.
In addition to checking these common impediments, we advise that you take time to review the Salesforce documentation on performance and configuration that they offer. Here are some helpful documents:
- Lightning Console Technical Requirements
- Enabling Debug Mode for Lightning Components
- Best Practices for Optimizing Visualforce Performance
- Lightning Components Performance Best Practices
You can also check out some of our other blogs on Lightning to help you answer other common questions that we’ve seen around Lightning implementation, migration, and execution.
- What You Should Know About Migrating to Salesforce Lightning
- Lightning Implementation: All-At-Once or Step-By-Step?
- Merging Unrelated Records in Salesforce Lightning
Hopefully, these tips and resources can help your team improve page loading speeds and get back to working in Lightning without worrying about loading speeds. If you need more information on Lightning or help optimizing your Lightning environment, please engage with us via the comments below or reach out to XTIVIA today.