In order to identify performance related issues, a health-check was performed. Health-check indicated that a host of scripts and custom solutions had to be optimized.

In order to improve the performance, code was refactored, js and css files were minified, different compression techniques were used, and certain solutions were re-developed from the scratch, thus improving the performance and making the portal light and quick.

Their intranet portal’s home page consisted a lot of web parts for Alerts, News, Videos, RSS Feeds, Stocks, Survey Charts, My Links, Countdown, etc, this added to the page’s load time. We compressed the images and thumbnails for Alerts, News and Videos section. For the Stocks webpart, stockticker.js, was replaced with Yahoo! Finance REST API. The custom web parts like My Links, Countdown and the Survey charts, were redeveloped from the scratch to optimize its performance.

For Survey chart, a form was developed, which stored the data in a list from where it was fetched and provided to the charts, using JSOM, for it to be real-time. We also used jqPlot, a jquery plugin, which provided the users a possibility to view the chart in either bar or pie form.

The Countdown timer, for the new events was differentiated from the home page, to load the page quickly, using a jquery plugin, countdown timer.

Thus, following the best practices for custom coding and using compression techniques, we were able to reduce the page load time of the entire portal, making it significantly light and faster for user interaction.

Performance and load time improvement resulted in better user adaptation and employee engagement with their Intranet Portal. Thus justifying their ROI on SharePoint online and Office 365.