Forum Discussion
Customizing MasterPage on SPO Publishing Site
Paging Microsoft here for an official clarification. According to this article, which is explicitly talking about (enterprise) portals, we should stay away from customizing the master page:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/solution-guidance/portal-branding.
quote
customizing master pages leads to additional risks and maintenance costs, and it's recommended to avoid it, when possible.
/quote
So, my company built a SPO publishing portal following this guidance by only creating custom page layouts, custom CSS (added via AlternateCssUrl PowerShell) and custom JavaScript (added via custom script action PowerShell) and some Content Search WebPart display templates to surface content.
Recently the customer complained about performance and brought in a Microsoft PFE. He provided a test.master (and test pagelayout for the matters, both containing traces of a Website called topsharepoint.com) and recommended to remove all "unrelated" placeholders without clear guidance which ones should this be (just mentioned the test.master should serve as an example). But the provided test.master doesn't even display the searchbox, site logo and top navigation, rendering the whole site unusable.
I'm quite confused now, not to mention that the customer is quite upset (because he assumes we have provided an inferior solution due to lack of knowledge), what the correct guidance should be.
VesaJuvonen, Mark-Kashman can you please provide some more clear guidance? I'm even willing to open a support request, as I am struggling to create an optimized masterpage b/c I don't know what can be safely removed.
Feel free to PM me directly and I can provide access to a test/demo SPO site to get you an idea.
TIA!
Siegfried Weber
Technically custom master pages are still supported in SharePoint Online with classic experiences. This is NOT however recommended option like covered in our OFFICIAL documentation since it will block potentially new capabilities to be landing on the sites which are using this custom master page.
If you are however targeting for maximum performance, using custom master page can potentially help on this, since you can potentially reduce the used placeholders, which will reduce the needed operations in both server and in client side. This would though mean that you would also lose some of the oob capabilities and any oob enhancement in the future would not be available.
So - this is not really a black and white decision, but we do NOT recommend usage of custom master pages.
- Mmm...I'm definitively surprise with the conclusions and recommendations done by the PFE that IMHO are clearly wrong...only having a small knowledge of all PnP stuff should be enough for this PFE to no advising to use a custom master page. Performance problems must be on another place in this particular SPO deployment
- VesaJuvonen
Microsoft
Technically custom master pages are still supported in SharePoint Online with classic experiences. This is NOT however recommended option like covered in our OFFICIAL documentation since it will block potentially new capabilities to be landing on the sites which are using this custom master page.
If you are however targeting for maximum performance, using custom master page can potentially help on this, since you can potentially reduce the used placeholders, which will reduce the needed operations in both server and in client side. This would though mean that you would also lose some of the oob capabilities and any oob enhancement in the future would not be available.
So - this is not really a black and white decision, but we do NOT recommend usage of custom master pages.
