Improve portal performance
Summarize
Summary of Improve portal performance
This guidance helps ServiceNow customers enhance portal performance by reducing load times and optimizing display. It focuses on widget management, menu simplification, content optimization, and image loading improvements to deliver faster, smoother user experiences in portals like Employee Center.
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Key Features
- Widget Performance Metrics: Use the Performance details feature to track load times, customization status, and visibility for each widget on a page. This insight helps identify performance bottlenecks.
- Asynchronous Widget Loading: Enable asynchronous loading on supported widgets (e.g., Content experience, Recommended for you, Popular topics) to load data incrementally as it becomes available, reducing overall portal load time. Note that asynchronous loading disables performance tracking for those widgets.
- Mega Menu Optimization: Reduce the number of topics displayed and limit menu depth to two levels or fewer to decrease backend processing and speed up menu rendering.
- Connected Content Reduction: Limit topics to connect about 80% of published content, removing outdated or unnecessary content to improve page load times.
- Lazy Loading of Mega Menu: Apply a simple server script adjustment in the “Employee Center Navigation” widget to defer topic visibility evaluation on first load, further improving performance.
- Remove Data-Heavy Widgets: Consider eliminating widgets that load large data sets if performance issues persist.
- Image Load Optimization: Use CDN URLs for banner, background, and app icon images on Employee Center to speed up image loading.
- Hotspots for Widget Performance Tracking: Add hotspots to custom widgets to capture load times and facilitate debugging of slow-loading components.
Key Outcomes
- Faster portal load times through asynchronous data loading and reduced backend processing.
- Improved user experience by displaying content progressively and minimizing wait times.
- Better monitoring and diagnostics of widget performance to target optimization efforts effectively.
- Streamlined portal navigation with simplified Mega Menu structures and targeted content connections.
- Enhanced image loading speed leveraging CDN resources.
Discover ways to reduce portal loading time and enhance portal display.
Review widget performance metrics
The Performance details feature provides comprehensive tracking of each widget on a page, enabling better assessment of the user experience. You can view load times, customization status, and display visibility for each widget. For guidance on accessing the widget performance metrics, see View widget performance metrics.
Enable asynchronous loading for widgets
By default, widgets try to load and display data simultaneously. This can cause longer load times in content-heavy portals. To improve loading speed and reduce employee wait times, select the Asynchronous option to enable widgets to display data as it becomes available, instead of waiting for all the data to load.
- Content experience
- Recommended for you
- Popular topics
- Quick Links
- My applications
- My active items
For step-by-step instructions to enable asynchronous loading, see Improve portal load time with asynchronous loading.
Reduce Mega Menu size
Reduce the number of topics that are shown on the Mega Menu – the more the number of topics the more evaluations that need to done in the back end to calculate visibility of each topic. You can also decide to surface only two levels of topics instead of three levels.
Reduce the amount of connected content
Reducing the amount of connected content can help improve page load times, as topics with more linked items—like quick links, knowledge articles, and catalog items—take longer to load. Aim to connect only 80% of published content to topics, allowing the remaining items to be accessible through search. Also, remove any unnecessary content, such as outdated or unpublished versions, from topics.
For guidance on navigating to a topic and viewing its connected content, see Create and associate topics.
lazy loading of Employee Center Mega menu, so topic visibility in not evaluated at the first load
It is a one-line change in the Server Script. In the “Employee Center Navigation” widget > Server Script, look for “megaMenuTopics = portalTaxonomy.getTopics(true, 2, false);” (line 37 or so) and change the first parameter to “false”. We also recommend changing the second parameter to 0/1. This parameter defines how many topic levels we return for the Mega Menu to show, the less levels the easier it is for a user to NOT face the use case of clicking on something and not seeing anything in it.
Remove data-heavy widgets
As a final resort, consider removing widgets that load large amounts of data.