Is Salesforce Lightning 25% Faster Now?

Alongside the new features delivered in recent releases, you may have already noticed improved performances on pages that previously might have taken longer to become usable. What exactly has changed? Some Salesforce professionals share that loading speed is one of the reasons for switching back and forth between Salesforce Lightning and Classic, whether when working on records or in Setup. However, chances are this will no longer be the case in the future.

In this post, we will dive into the improvements Salesforce is working on to further optimize the Lightning Experience, what has been achieved so far, and how you can explore related metrics in your own org.

Progress Towards the Goal

Right before Dreamforce ‘24, Salesforce announced that the page load time in Lightning Experience is 25% faster than it was at the beginning of 2023, confirming once again that the effort, which started fairly recently, has produced significant results in improving the overall user experience when navigating on the platform.

For added context, at the beginning of 2024, this increase was 12% compared to the starting point in 2023, meaning that not only has there been a positive YoY change, but Salesforce actually doubled the initial achievement in just a few months!

Salesforce is aiming for a 40% improvement in Experienced Page Time by early 2025, and so far, they’re heading towards their goal at lightning speed.

What Is Experienced Page Time?

Specific to the Salesforce Lightning Experience, Experienced Paged Time (EPT) is a performance metric for the page load time. Unlike Salesforce Classic, where pages are rendered mostly on the server side, Lightning Experience uses a client-side framework which allows pages and components to be progressively loaded, offering a more dynamic experience on top of the look, feel, and additional available functionality.

The EPT value is displayed in seconds and measures the time it takes for the page to load from the page start until no more activity occurs. The calculation of this result is not always straightforward – possibly never – as it takes into account a variety of factors, including the complexity of the implementation, the network and browser on the client side, and Apex and API processing on the server side, to name a few. Be sure to also review the additional considerations.

The Ongoing Improvements

Based on feedback from Salesforce professionals across the ecosystem, starting from March 2023, Salesforce has embarked on the journey of lowering the EPT and improving the overall experience while sharing constant updates on progress ever since, alongside the detailed breakdown of the changes being made in the background to achieve these desired results.

While you might have already heard about the refreshed Lightning UI and saw it being used in all the latest demos from Salesforce, the backend enhancements pertaining to the Lightning Experience speed seem to have flown a bit under the radar outside of more technical folk, but this is something that all Salesforce professionals should be looking forward to.

Following their decision to prioritize the optimization of both first navigation and subsequent navigation (i.e. navigating to other pages after the first page load), Salesforce have planned numerous changes to significantly improve the experience. As of now, improvements such as the switch to user-agnostic Flexipages for the most used standard objects (Account, Contact, Opportunity, Case, and Lead), converting frequently used components from Aura to LWC have already been delivered in production orgs, alongside added abilities to prefetch data, increased number of connections to the server, and shipping components JavaScript code instead of strings.

Further enhancements in all these areas are on the roadmap, and will be rolled out in the future – make sure to check out the listed resources below for all details provided by the Web Platform team in their blog posts. 

To ensure that this initiative will keep being prioritized, don’t forget to upvote its dedicated idea on IdeaExchange and share your own feedback as well.

See It For Yourself

Since the performance is measured in EPT, what about taking a look at your own org? There are four ways to do this, and we’ll take a look at two of them, which you can immediately check without further configuration or additional tools.

First of all, if you’ve been administering or developing in Salesforce for a while, chances are you have already visited the Lightning Usage App on more than one occasion. Here is where some key activity, usage, and security metrics are readily available to you – one of which is the page performance.

You can see in the example below that the Page tab on the left displays a series of charts showing the overall performance of the most viewed pages. While it looks quite good in the fairly new Developer Edition I opened this in, production orgs will surely paint a different picture, with more variations in performance in some cases.

Probably a lesser-known way to check the page performance (unless you’ve looked into Experienced Page Time before) is the ability to quickly add a counter on the page by appending “?eptVisible=1” at the end of your page URL. The counter will display the number of seconds, with two decimals places, in case you’d like to track more detailed variations before or after a series of record page changes, for example.

Another way to add the EPT counter, but also the network bandwidth if needed, is to enable Lightning Components Debug Mode in Setup. This option, however, can negatively impact performance time in comparison with the first option, as caching is disabled and code minification (the removal of unnecessary characters from code to increase performance with no impact on the functionality) won’t happen in this scenario.

Lightning Speed on the Go

Desktop experience enhancements are not the only ones on Salesforce’s radar recently. While it is a different initiative and collaboration with the Sales Cloud team, significant changes have also been made to the Salesforce mobile application – with one of the considerations being the optimization of the speed at which users can navigate between screens and records or even take action. Additionally, the Lightning Experience improvements mentioned above had a positive impact across all Salesforce applications, including the mobile one.

If you haven’t already, make sure to take a look at the updated version of the mobile application. Ultimately, regardless of where users will be working, it is clear that Salesforce is investing time and effort, with customer feedback in mind, to continue improving the end-to-end experience across the board.

Summary

The effort to make Lightning Experience faster is something that Salesforce has approached differently, especially with the level of detail the team provided and transparency in the process and timeline. So far, it seems to be returning the results they (and all of us) are hoping for. With many changes in technology and Salesforce being configured in so many different ways, it is a journey worth following to see what is coming next.

Have you already seen benefits from these changes? Is Experienced Page Time something you’ve been keeping a close eye on? Let us know in the comments below!

Resources

• Lightning Experience with Lightning Speed (Are We There Yet?)
• Our Detailed Plan to Improve Lightning Experience Performance
• Lightning Experience Performance: First Anniversary, Results, and Outlook
• Announcing 25% Faster Lightning Experience
• The Analyze Button: Improve Your Salesforce Lightning Page Load Speed