Creating and launching a healthy SharePoint portal

• 10/28/2021
• 2 minutes to read

A portal is a Microsoft SharePoint site on your intranet with many site viewers who consume the content. In large organizations, you could have several, such as a company portal and an HR portal.

Typically portals have relatively few people who create and author the site and its content. Most visitors to the portal only read and consume the content.

What type of site should I use as my portal?

SharePoint Online has several types of sites and page types. For portals, we highly recommend using a communication site with a site page for the home page, the default configuration when you create a communication site. Site pages allow you to use out-of-the-box web parts, custom web parts, and extensions.

To learn more, see Create communication sites in SharePoint.

Guidance

This set of guidance will walk you through best practices and recommendations before you launch your portal and how to keep your portal healthy.

Icon What to do Follow this Plan the rollout of your portal Launch in waves Portal design guidance Review the guidance while designing your sites Run the Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool Validate your pages and follow the guidance Optimize your Performance Follow the guidance below and run the Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool

Use CDN for better performance Implement Public and Private Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

Batch REST API calls to SharePoint Combine operations into fewer requests

Improve performance for slow web parts Follow guidance to remediate common issues

Review page weight Follow guidance to reduce page weight in your site pages

Limit the number of requests to a page Limit the number of web parts and calls into SharePoint

Optimize your images Follow basic image optimization for the web

Limit and use Iframes carefully Don't use more than two Iframes on a page

Optimize extensions Follow the guidance to optimize and limit your custom extensions Modern portal limits Follow the limits for modern portals to further optimize performance Network optimization Configure your URLs and IP endpoints