Are you having performance issues?

Website performance is a crucial concern in any website, being it public or internal.

BindTuning assets impact on page load

As with any other resource, BindTuning products add some extra loading time, as follows:

Product	Extra Loading Time
Theme - custom master pages	4.06 sec
Theme - CSS-only	1.69 sec
Web Parts	2.55 sec

General performance improvements

If you are having performance issues, and detect abnormal loading times in your SharePoint or Office365 installation, bare in mind that performance can be affected by numerous other factors.

To improve your website's performance, please try some of the recommended actions below, which should help improve loading time:

Use managed metadata navigation; this MS article explains the differences between navigation types and performance issues:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Navigation-options-for-SharePoint-Online-adb92b80-b342-4ecb-99a1-da2a2b4782eb?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
Debug slow pages, and look for large image files. Reduce files size. Large images should not be larger than 400Kb, while small images not larger than 100Kb. All best practices and recommendations can be found in this article:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Tune-SharePoint-Online-performance-f0522d4a-fbf4-41f9-854e-c9b59555091d
In Office 365 scenarios, Office 365 itself makes several post back calls reporting data back to Microsoft. These calls are reported to cause, in some cases, delays over 20 secs. If this is the case, load time will be affected with or without BindTuning assets. Microsoft does not provide an option to turn off this services but using a custom script in the master page or in the affected pages is possible to remove it:

https://michielvanerp.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/sahrepoint-online-ceip-wsaupload-aspx

IE-only performance issues?

Some pages using BindTuning themes, when compared to standard SharePoint branding (Seattle), show a significant increase in load times when using Internet Explorer. The increase can be as high as 30 seconds.

The pages reported to be having performance issues include:

SharePoint newsfeed, when showing a large amount of feeds with embedded pictures
Task list and Timeline bar, when showing a large number of tasks, or tasks assigned to the timeline bar
Large documents list, when showing a large number of metadata fields. Also, navigation by managed metadata navigation

We could validate that, on Internet Explorer, these pages have an increase of up to 10 seconds in CSS style calculations. These calculations occur whenever there is the need to re-draw elements on the page, such as adding new content to the page, updating styles and changing classes on elements.

Due to the sheer number of HTML elements added to these pages by the above mentioned SharePoint web parts, as well as the complexity of its structure, the performance drop becomes more noticeable.

CSS file size is responsible for an overhead in page loading times in Internet Explorer browser in some very specific SharePoint pages/scenarios. The larger CSS file size in BindTuning themes is mostly due to supporting a responsive framework, in this case Bootstrap. The styling required to guarantee compatibility across devices, from mobile to desktop, requires a large increase in CSS styling. This occurs not only with BindTuning themes, but with any responsive theme.

For an immediate improve in IE performance, we suggest:

Limit the number of items to be displayed within SharePoint web parts.
Remove unused CSS rules for each specific scenario and create a version of the file using only the essential to reduce its size and complexity. We may include a minimized CSS file in future theme versions, having in mind that some Bootstrap features will not be supported by that smaller version.

Web Parts loading time issues

When using BindTuning web parts you may notice different performance results on different pages, even when using the same web part. Several situations may cause this, some include:

One list has more items than the other
If using the Calendar Web Part, it may be due to having may recurring events in one of the calendars
If using the Tiles Web Part, we are currently having a delay retrieving the weather.

If the list is the same, of if the list is not the cause, it may be due to other elements on the page. As an example, the Yammer feed won’t let anything else be loaded on a page before itself being loaded. This is just one example; other elements may cause similar behaviour.