Performance Tuning Sitecore XP on Azure
Performance Tuning Sitecore XP on Azure: How to Achieve Enterprise-Grade Speed for Less Than $1,000 a Month
At SUGCON ANZ 2025, PING Works CTO and Sitecore MVP Richard Hauer delivered a powerful session titled Performance Tuning XP on Azure. The presentation revealed how organisations can unlock exceptional performance from Sitecore XP environments hosted on Azure App Services—without blowing the budget. The results were staggering: 150 million page views per month, sub-second page delivery, and a total infrastructure cost of under $1,000 per month.
Why Performance Matters More Than Ever
Performance isn’t just about speed. It’s about cost efficiency, scalability, user experience, and business continuity. Poor performance can lead to higher operational costs, frustrated users, and missed opportunities. Optimising your Sitecore environment is no longer optional - it’s essential for delivering seamless digital experiences.
The Challenge
Sitecore XP is a powerful platform, but when deployed on Azure without optimisation, it can consume unnecessary resources and deliver suboptimal results. Richard’s presentation tackled this challenge head-on, demonstrating how smart configuration changes and strategic tuning can transform performance without major code rewrites.
The Approach
The optimisation journey begans with a clear goal: maximise throughput and minimise response times while keeping costs low. Using a Sitecore MVC 10.2 standalone instance on Azure, Richard demonstrated baseline performance and applied incremental improvements using tools like Sitecore’s admin dashboards and Grafana K6 load testing to provide visibility into bottlenecks and helped to validate the results.
Key Optimisations That Made the Difference
Startup timing can be an issue with Sitecore, so tuning app restart times can dramatically improve startup performance, enabling confident use of elastic scaling. Pipeline optimisation also removed unnecessary processors and features, improving load times. Precompiled views and database prefetching cut startup time from 83 seconds to just 17 seconds. Component caching boosted throughput and peak performance, while offloading static assets to a CDN delivered a 220% increase in throughput, 515% improvement in peak capacity, and 70% faster response times.
The Results
After applying these optimisations, a single Azure instance with 2 CPUs and 7GB RAM served 18,000 pages in five minutes—equivalent to 150 million pages per month. This level of performance would rank among Australia’s top 15 websites, ahead of major brands like ABC and Netflix, all for less than $1,000 per month.
Why This Matters for Your Business
These strategies aren’t just about speed—they enable cost efficiency, scalability, and resilience. By leveraging Azure’s elastic capabilities and applying proven tuning techniques, businesses can deliver exceptional digital experiences without the overhead of expensive infrastructure or unnecessary complexity.
Ready to Optimise Your Sitecore Environment?
If you’re ready to transform your Sitecore performance and unlock the full potential of Azure, now is the time to act. Download the full presentation and discover the step-by-step strategies that can help you achieve world-class performance without enterprise-level costs.
