Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) in SharePoint 2013

Introduction

There are various new features in SharePoint 2013 over SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2013 is a big change from SharePoint's earlier Versions (2007 & 2013). It has a new UI, new development app model and many performance improvement capabilities. SharePoint 2013 is a huge hit among SharePoint communities and business.

SharePoint 2013 was released with some exciting features such as:

  • Real Time Social Feed
  • Shredded Storage
  • SharePoint Apps
  • Cross-site publishing
  • Out-of-Box PDF support
  • Minimal Download Strategy

Here I will explain the Minimal Download Strategy.

In the web application concept where the user sends a request and gets a response back, the entire web page will be reloaded even if you update the entire page or a part in the page. And this causes some performance issues for the end user like the page loading time and so on.

For this reason Microsoft introduced this concept.

Minimal Download Strategy helps a SharePoint site to improve the Page Load.

The Minimal Download Strategy in SharePoint 2013 improves the rendering performance for the user browsing the content where large parts of the page are not changed, providing a more fluid navigation experience.

For example, when navigating between a site's home page and Shared Documents page only the content that has changed between the source and destination page (controls and placeholders in the content area) are downloaded and the URL is subsequently updated where the chrome is persisted.

Enable/Disable the MDS

The Feature for team sites, community sites and so on in SharePoint 2013 is enabled by default. If you deactivate this feature you will lose the benefit of caching.

Procedure activate the feature

Go to the SharePoint Settings --> Site Setting --> Site Actions Manage site features, then select the "Minimal Download Strategy" feature.

Then click on Activate/Deactivate the MDS Feature.