Create Mobile, Performance, and Security Plans

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe the importance of a mobile strategy.
Identify potential triggers for performance problems.
Develop a site security plan.

Create a Mobile-Friendly Digital Experience

This is it, the final sprint to the finish line for Cloud Kicks and its new microsite! The Great Athletic Event is only a few months away, so the Cloud Kicks site team concentrates on making their last decisions.

Over half of customer interactions happen on mobile devices, so leaving the mobile experience to chance is a risky move. The Cloud Kicks team uses the following questions to guide their mobile decisions.

What’s the goal of our mobile experience?
Who is our audience?
Should we build a standalone mobile app, or do we just need a mobile website?
If we build an app, how can we enrich the experience? For example, do we want to incorporate push notifications and biometric login?
If we build a mobile website, how can we adjust the site design to work on smaller screens?

A mobile app can be very powerful, but with great power comes… a larger toll on Cloud Kicks’s already limited resources. Because the Cloud Kicks microsite has a short lifespan and a narrow focus, the team opts to use a mobile website rather than build a full mobile app.

The mobile site serves the same purposes as the main website.

Helping customers learn about the limited-edition The Great Athletic Event sneakers.
Enabling customers to sign up for notifications.
Providing information about the Cloud Kicks brand.

The casual shopper user viewing the new Cloud Kicks site on a tablet device.

As part of her QA responsibilities, Linda makes a note to preview the site on as many different types of mobile devices as possible before launch. With so much of their web traffic anticipated to happen on mobile, the Cloud Kicks microsite isn’t complete until it’s pixel perfect on both mobile and desktop devices. If Linda sees anything unusual during her mobile reviews, the team will need to make adjustments in Experience Builder before publishing the site.

Tools and Methods to Support Performance and Scale

Linda and Erica want nothing but sunshine and rainbows for Cloud Kicks fans checking out the limited-edition The Great Athletic Event sneakers. Slow page loads, wonky renderings, or time-out errors from too much site traffic? No thanks. To ensure the best possible customer experience, Linda and Erica think about how they expect customers to interact with their site, how likely traffic spikes are, and what variables can impact site performance.

What do we mean by performance and scale? Performance is the time it takes your site to load a single page in a desktop browser or on a mobile device. Scale is your site’s ability to serve pages under increasing load while maintaining good page performance. Page issues typically occur when a site’s scale limits are exceeded.

New to building websites, Erica and Linda don’t know much about site performance, so they start with some research. They learn performance issues typically are related to:

The number and type of licenses used for a site
The number of logins per month
The number of page views per month
Excessive site traffic
The number of customizations made to a site

Earlier in the module, Erica and Linda learned their microsite doesn’t require additional licenses, and their page won’t support customer logins. And while Cloud Kicks hopes lots of fans check out the new microsite, the site isn’t hosting the launch itself (that’ll happen on Cloud Kicks’s separate commerce site). So Cloud Kicks doesn’t anticipate huge crowds swarming the site at the same time.

Other than submitting contact information through the Lead Form, page interactions will be pretty low. This microsite is all about sharing information and allowing signups! And finally, because Cloud Kicks is sticking to the basics with its microsite, customizations also are unlikely to cause performance issues.

It sounds like Cloud Kicks is unlikely to experience major performance issues—great news for the team. As a best practice, Cloud Kicks still plans to complete performance and scale testing before launching the microsite. Additionally, Erica and Linda learn that Salesforce recommends serving all microsites from a content delivery network (CDN) for the best performance at scale. As the Salesforce admin, Linda will work with Cloud Kicks’s IT team to help configure the microsite using a CDN when the time is right.

To learn more about tools and best practices to improve performance on high-traffic sites, check out the resources at the end of this unit.

Develop a Site Security Plan

It’s time to create a plan to keep the limited-edition The Great Athletic Event sneakers microsite super secure.

Salesforce includes a variety of security settings and permissions you can use when you’re building a site on the Experience Cloud platform. It’s worth spending some time on this, because data security is critical to the integrity of your business. Beyond protecting your data, security includes authentication and public unauthenticated access. Here are some questions Linda, Erica, and the Cloud Kicks Security team think through when creating their site security plan.

Question	Cloud Kicks Response
How much access to different objects in Salesforce do we want to give our site’s users? Is this access different for authenticated users versus unauthenticated users?	We want site users to have access only to the content we publish on the site, and not to any specific Salesforce objects. Our site doesn’t include an authenticated experience, so the access is the same for all visitors.
Do we want to encrypt data elements? Does our org already have an encryption policy for internal users?	We aren’t using encryption today, but maybe we should be. The Cloud Kicks Security team should look into this more.
Do we want users to sign into our site, browse only as guest users, or both? What default object permissions do we want to grant the guest user profile?	Users won’t sign into our site, but to collect contact information with the Lead Form, the guest user will need Create access on the Lead object.

For a full list of security questions to consider, check out Develop a Security Plan for Your Experience Cloud Site in Salesforce Help.

With their straightforward microsite, the security work is lightweight for Cloud Kicks. However, discussing these questions identified a few areas where the company could strengthen its approach to security at a higher level in its Salesforce org.

Final Considerations

Before they wrap up their work, the Cloud Kicks team needs to address a few lingering (but important) items.

Accessibility

Cloud Kicks wants to create a quality user experience for every site visitor, which requires ensuring the site meets accessibility standards. This includes adding alt-text for images, using colors that can be interpreted comfortably by all users, and formatting text in screen reader–friendly ways. Cloud Kicks also looks into hiring an outside firm to review the site for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance.

Legal Impact

Cloud Kicks needs to be compliant with relevant privacy laws, such as GDPR. For example, it must allow users to opt-out of nonessential cookies, which requires a third-party tool. Cloud Kicks loops in its legal team to review the site plans and weigh in on any other actions required to keep the site in good legal standing.

With these decisions finalized, Cloud Kicks is ready to go! For your own planning, we highly recommend you pause before wrapping up to think through anything unique to your company, industry, or geolocation that might impact your site. This could include anything from local or industry regulations to company best practices and standards. Even the examples mentioned above might have special requirements for your business.

Cue the Confetti (And Tune In for the Opening Ceremonies)

It’s hard to believe, but Erica and Linda’s work is done! OK, their planning work is done—but that’s no small feat! Great timing, because The Great Athletic Event is just around the corner.

Erica, Linda, and the rest of the Cloud Kicks team are excited to transition to building, promoting, and launching their new Experience Cloud Site. Thanks to the work they put into strategizing and planning, the team has a clear blueprint to guide them to success.

Erica and Linda high-fiving at their work desk as confetti falls around them.