Creating and launching a healthy SharePoint portal
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. We don't recommend using SharePoint portals to host a town hall or live event.
Tip
Are you wanting to host a live event or town hall? Here are the options we recommend:
- Learn about Microsoft Teams live events
- Learn about hosting events with Viva Engage
- Link directly to the live event you are streaming (not through your portal)
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.
Important
Modern Team sites are designed for use on collaboration sites, like projects / interest groups / focus areas or when you would like to collaborate with other team members. To learn more, see Create team sites in SharePoint.
The App page type was designed to be used for specific business applications within SharePoint Online. It was not designed to be used as a SharePoint Team site or a SharePoint Portal. To learn more, see Creating application pages 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 |
|---|---|---|
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Plan the rollout of your portal | Launch in waves |
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Portal design guidance | Review the guidance while designing your sites |
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Run the Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool | Validate your pages and follow the guidance |
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Optimize your Performance | Follow the guidance below and run the Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool |
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Use CDN for better performance | Implement Public and Private Content Delivery Networks (CDN) |
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Batch REST API calls to SharePoint | Combine operations into fewer requests |
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Improve performance for slow web parts | Follow guidance to remediate common issues |
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Review page weight | Follow guidance to reduce page weight in your site pages |
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Limit the number of requests to a page | Limit the number of web parts and calls into SharePoint |
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Limit the number of search requests on a page | Follow the guidance to limit the number of search requests on a page. |
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Optimize your images | Follow basic image optimization for the web |
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Limit and use Iframes carefully | Don't use more than two Iframes on a page |
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Optimize extensions | Follow the guidance to optimize and limit your custom extensions |
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Modern portal limits | Follow the limits for modern portals to further optimize performance |
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Network optimization | Configure your URLs and IP endpoints |