Improve List View Speed and Performance

Salesforce List Views are designed for a snapshot view of current and important records — the recommended maximum is 2,000 records per view. Anything over 2,000 should be handled using a Report instead. Use the tips below to improve performance.

Top 5 Best Practices for List View Performance

1. Use the EQUALS operator rather than the CONTAINS operator in filter criteria.
2. Use the AND logical operator rather than OR in filter combinations.
3. Use Relative Date Values for Filter Criteria to select smaller, more specific data sets.
4. Reduce the number of fields being displayed — particularly Formula fields and Lookup fields, which require additional database calculations.
5. Add additional AND filters to narrow down the results below 2,000 records.

Additional notes:

• Improving performance can be a trial-and-error process. Each user may experience different results depending on their role, record visibility, and assigned permission sets.
• List View results are truncated at 2,000 records. Retrieving more than 2,000 records wastes resources — add selective filters to bring results below that limit.
• If a user has many permission sets assigned, List View loading can be slow. As a solution, create a Permission Set Group, add all required permission sets into it, assign the group to the user, and remove individual permission sets that are no longer needed.

Advanced Tips for Salesforce Administrators

• A filter criteria can be tested by executing a similar SOQL query in Workbench. Use the SOQL Query tool to quickly check how many records your filter would return before applying it to the List View.
• If a List View returns fewer than 2,000 records but still loads slowly, your System Administrator can contact Salesforce Support to request database indexing on a specific filter field.
• If a List View returns more than 2,000 records, filters must be added to reduce the number of records returned — there is no other workaround.

Improving Enhanced List Views on Visualforce Pages

If a Visualforce page uses an <apex:enhancedList> component that takes a long time to load, a developer can optimize performance by setting the listId attribute to a specific, highly selective List View ID — for example, a view filtered to records created TODAY. This prevents the component from loading all records by default.
For example, instead of loading all records, the listId attribute should reference a pre-filtered List View ID that returns a small, targeted set of records. The List View ID can be obtained from the URL of the List View in Salesforce Setup.