Admins

Guide to Page Layouts in Salesforce

By Christine Marshall

Salesforce page layouts are critical to user experience design, allowing you to organize fields in a logical order, as well as set field properties, add buttons, actions and related lists. Page layouts in Salesforce can be tailored to different teams around your organization so each role can access what they need, faster. 

How you design a page layout in Salesforce can make or break user adoption – good design leads to greater ROI (return on investment), so it’s never too early to start thinking about your users’ experience!

With a page layout, you can control:

  • Which fields are visible (add and remove fields),
  • Where blank spaces appear between fields,
  • Field properties, including Read-Only and Required,
  • Page sections,
  • The number of columns in a section and tab-key order,
  • Which buttons and actions are included, such as ‘Edit’, ‘Clone’ or ‘Delete’, and in which order, 
  • Which related lists appear, and customize their properties (eg. choosing which fields to display).

In this guide, we’ll explore how you can create Salesforce page layouts, and customize page layouts for different teams.

How to Create a Page Layout in Salesforce

Head over into Setup > Object Manager > [find the object you want to work with] > Page Layouts. 

From here you can view and edit existing page layouts or create new ones:

Page Layout Sections

You can create sections for fields. This can make navigation easier for users and, if collapsible sections are enabled, the sections can then be expanded/collapsed.

When you create or edit a section, you can determine if the header is visible:

  • Detail page (non-edit)
  • Edit page

You can also define the number of columns, choosing from 1-column or 2-column and the tab-key order.

Click on the wrench icon to edit the section.

Field Options

Fields can be dragged and dropped, on and off the page layout. 

Once a field has been added, click on the wrench to set field properties. From here, you can choose to make a field ‘Read-Only’ or ‘Required’ at the page layout level.

Related Lists on Page Layouts

Related lists can be added and removed from the page layout. Additionally, you can control the related list properties, including which columns and buttons are displayed. This is really important to ensure you display enough information on a related list to make it useful to your users!

Actions

You can control which actions are available, and in what order, via ‘Mobile & Lightning Actions’.

These are the actions that appear at the top, right of a record e.g. Edit, Delete, Clone, and also on the Activity Timeline.

Assign a Salesforce Page Layout

You can have multiple page layouts for different profiles or record types. For example, on the Account object, you might have page layouts for Customers, Competitors and Partners. 

READ MORE: Salesforce Page Layouts Best Practices for Marketing Teams

You can edit the page layout assignment by clicking ‘Page Layout Assignment’.

From here, click ‘Edit Assignment’. On the following screen, you can select which layout each profile will see.

What’s the difference between Page Layouts and Record Types?

As we’ve seen, Salesforce page layouts determine which fields are displayed to your users on a record. They allow you to add fields, sections, links, custom buttons, and a few other features.

Record types let you offer different business processes, picklist values, and page layouts to different users. For example, you might use record types when you have different types of Opportunities that require a different sales process and different picklist values.

READ MORE: When to use Record Types Vs Page Layouts?

What about Dynamic Forms?

Great question. We can take our Salesforce page layout design to the next level by using Dynamic Forms. However, this feature is not yet available for standard objects and the traditional page layout still controls things such as:

  • Available related lists
  • Order of related lists
  • Columns on related lists
  • Mobile layout
READ MORE: Salesforce Dynamic Forms – Overview & Deep Dive Tutorial

The Author

Christine Marshall

Christine is the Courses Director at Salesforce Ben. She is an 11x certified Salesforce MVP and leads the Bristol Admin User Group.

Comments:

    guru
    September 08, 2016 3:44 am
    Ben, I have two clarifications here - Assume that when I created new page layout, I haven't selected the feed based layout. But later I realized to have feed based layout. How to do this? - Can I assign this page layout directly to required profiles without assigning through record types?(assume no picklist field is available on page layout)
    Maxime Savart
    December 16, 2018 12:09 pm
    Page Layouts are one of the keys to maximize adoption ! Great post ! http://salesforcemax.fr/
    Jen Crook
    June 09, 2020 1:17 am
    I am curious about a few things. I might be seeing something different based on when this was written - it is now 4 years later! 1) Whenever I try to see a layout while I am working on it I get an error telling me there is no data. This even happens in production environment, so I know there is data. Any thoughts? 2) I was tasked to create a new Lead page, with mostly new fields but many less. One required field on my new page is also showing on the old page, even though I didn't add it there. Why? 3) In my research I saw that I can upload data without required fields creating errors, but I cannot make a change on an individual record in Salesforce. Example, I was trying to change the Lead owner and was stopped because the new field on the page is required, but because this is a very old original record that is not filled in on the page. Am I correct in my take on this being a one-off change, but a mass upload will go through? Thanks for any info you can offer - I have to do this with Contacts also, and that will be going from 2 recored types to just 1, and 1 page layout. I want to be sure this will all work! Hope to hear from you soon. Best -
    Shawn C
    May 17, 2023 3:20 pm
    Is there a way to move existing page layouts from production to sandbox for testing?

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