Can anything be done to improve the speed of a Salesforce Communities site?

Question

We are using Salesforce Communities to publish articles. We have noticed that the site is extremely slow to load. While the server may respond in a second or two, the content is loaded dynamically and can take over 11.5 seconds to load.

For example, our home page using the KOA template on average takes 11.5 seconds to load the page, with no images and very light content. We averaged the time on multiple loads using non-cached version of the page.

We found that as we tested these pages ore and more, the performance improved marginally, but still not enough to be acceptable.

Sometimes links to specific articles also take over 10 seconds to load. Again, no images, and light content. Repeated loads of the same articles take 3.5 seconds on average, I assume do to network cache or something similar.

I brought this up to our account exec and he said this is the first he's heard of it. However, I cannot believe we're the only Salesforce customer who's dealing with this.

Does anyone know if there's a way to increase Salesforce Communities load performance?

Answer 1

The performance issues can be mitigated via below:

1. Raise a case with support and push hard to put your community on a cache. Caching will improve speed.

2. Have you moved to new templates? Moving to a new Summer 16 you will see some performance increase.

3. Do you use Custom lightning components for your community? You can use new lightning inspector to find our components that are causing issues.

Answer 2

In which region of the world are you located? Salesforce has very few data centers, and the round-trip can make page load very slow. - Access needs to be cached in a closer location. Think Akamai or a similar service. - Reduce the number of requests in your page - Sometimes, page are linking to resources not stored on SalesForce, and those can also negatively affect performance.