You’ve installed your Web Portal using Dynamics 365 have started looking at adding content and managing the data processes between CRM and your end users. Have you considered how important speed is to the user experience and search engine rankings? Fortunately Dynamics 365 Portals is hosted on Microsoft Azure, the best in class computing cloud platform service which does the leg work in terms of reliability and performance.
Hardware and infrastructure isn’t the only concern though, as your code can have severe bottlenecks weighing your website down and pushing users away from your Portal. Not only that, a bloated website is particularly non mobile friendly as it will drain the devices CPU, memory and data resources. Research indicates 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, so its important your dynamics 365 portal is as fast as possible.
We’ve put together this check list to keep your Dynamics 365 Portal running fast and reducing the chance of crashes.
1) Compress your images
Having extra large images on web portals can drastically increase the page load time for users. If you’re only displaying the image in the browser at 500 x 500 pixels, there’s no need to use an image that’s 2000 x 2000. That extra resolution information is simply going to waste.
We also strongly suggest compressing the image slightly if it is a JPEG as this will drastically reduce the file size with no noticeable difference to your picture. This can be done in most image editing programs such as Photoshop, but also using web applications such as compressjpeg.com
2) Optimise your CSS and Javascript
Scripts can take a large percentage of your web portals data footprint. CSS can be stored inline, in a single page or as a CSS file on your Portal file directory. Steps can be taken to reduce the footprint such as using CSS compression, not duplicating code and general best practices. A large CSS file using the compression method could save you up to 50% in file size. You should also consider combining multiple files to reduce the amount of requests browsers will pull from the server.
3) Minimize HTTP requests
According to Yahoo, 80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different parts of the page, like images, stylesheets, and scripts.
An HTTP request is made for each one of these elements, so the more on-page components, the longer it takes for the page to render. You can use Google Chrome’s browser’s Developer Tools to see how many HTTP requests your site makes. Reducing this number of requests will speed up your site, look through your files and see if any are unnecessary.
4) Defer JavaScript loading
Deferring a file means preventing it from loading until after other elements have loaded. If you defer larger files, like JavaScript, you ensure that the rest of your content can load without a delay.
To do this you’ll need to place a call an external JavaScript file just before the HTML body tag.
More information can be found on this Javascript Deferal tutorial: https://varvy.com/pagespeed/defer-loading-javascript.html
5) Check if Portal processes are working correctly
It’s critical that data passed between the Portal, the CRM and any external processes are working correctly. If there are errors, the users browser may simply time out or continue to make repeated requests, slowing down the Portal for them and potentially even other users
It’s easy for dynamic content to have issues so we recommend regular audits and logs downloaded and backed up so developer teams can analyse and identify what the problem is and how to fix them.
We recommending using tools such as Googles Pagespeed insights for helping you analyse your portals bottlenecks and how to add performance: developers.google.com/insights
If you need any advice on speeding up your Dynamics 365 Web Portal, or want to discuss us supporting your solution, please contact us.