Visualforce pages provide a custom interface for users, improving productivity by reducing the number of forms required to create and maintain data compared to the standard user interface, and improving adoption. Non-performant or error-prone Visualforce pages can have the opposite effect, making the user experience frustrating and introducing a Visualforce tax on regular activities.
Studies have shown that a user accessing a non-performant application is also likely to believe it is difficult to use, poorly designed, and does not contain useful content, all of which present a barrier to adoption.
In this chapter, we will take a look at solutions to common issues encountered with Visualforce pages. We will then look at techniques for reducing the view state size and how writing information about the internal state of a controller to the Salesforce debug log can help to track down errors.