🚀 Boost Performance in Trello: Unleashing the Power of Dashcards!

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Have you played with Dashcards before? If you have, you’d know that they’re one of the coolest features in Trello, as they allow you to keep track of all your cards visually across multiple filters. If you need more convincing, you can learn more about Dashcards at https://blog.trello.com/dashcards-powerup

But what if I told you you can use Dashcards to make sure your boards are running smoothly in Trello? First, let’s learn a very common reason why boards can slow down in Trello.

🐌 Lots of cards, slower boards

Because Trello has to load open cards and attachments every time a board is opened, boards with a large number of open (i.e. not archived) cards may see slower load times and generally reduced usability. We suggest having fewer than 1000 open cards on any Trello board (and under 500 if there are a lot of attachments or checklists on the cards).

If you are experiencing slowness and have a lot of open cards, we recommend that you do the following:

• Archive / move cards and lists that are old or unused

• Move lists to a new board

You can also upgrade to the Standard subscription or above to have unlimited boards in your workspace, which will allow you to spread your open cards over as many boards as you see fit.

Some other good behaviours to take on include:

• If you’re using a board to track tasks for your team continuously, you should set up automations to regularly archive cards that are considered ‘done’ or move them to another board that acts as an archive

• If you’re using Trello to log items in your backlog, you should regularly discuss your backlog with your team, and archive any cards you’re not going to do

You can learn more at our help doc - https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/troubleshooting-a-slow-board/

It’s also good to keep in mind that Trello has hard resource limits which you can see here. This means that you cannot have more than 5000 open cards on a board at any time.

🔢 How can Dashcards help?

Using Dashcards, you can create cards that will count how many cards you have on your board. Here’s an example of this below!

In this screenshot, the Dashcard is set up to count all the cards on the board. If this board goes over 500 cards, then everyone on this board will be able to easily see that and fix the issue!

You don’t even have to have the Dashcard on the same board as the board it’s counting cards on! You could easily create a board that acts as a performance tracker for all your boards in your workspace, and has a Dashcard for each of your boards to make sure you’re not exceeding a healthy card volume on any of your boards.

You can enable the Dashcards Power-Up at https://trello.com/power-ups/6048e897c73d032a983e2a7c/dashcards

⚡️ My board has less than 500 open cards but is still running slowly

You may need to do some troubleshooting to fix the issue. If you’re using Trello on the web, you can follow our tutorial here to troubleshoot, and if you’re using Trello on our desktop apps, you can follow the tutorial here instead. If you’re still running into issues, you’re welcome to reach out at https://trello.com/contact for assistance!

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I’d love to hear your thoughts on Dashcards and how they’ve helped you in Trello. What is your favourite way to use Dashcards?

[Brittany Joiner]

This is awesome @Alex _ Trello !! I'd never thought about using them to keep track of cards for performance. That's amazing! 

I've used Dashcards for keeping track of cards with specific criteria, like how many are assigned to me this week or how many i completed last week!

[Rafael]

Unimportant for Kanban-style use of Trello. 

You see here what the bigger issue is: https://www.timecamp.com/blog/2023/02/27-trello-like-apps-to-consider-in-2023/

Every Kanban-like tool looks the same, for many good reasons.

What some of them miss, including Trello, that the "Activity" button and overview is the second mist important feature of the Trello board because you want to see what was going on these boards as a manager. However, Trello now decided to not only hide the old "Activity" overview on pressing "...", but now the "Activity" button is even more difficult to click between some rare board interactions such as "Close Board" or "Watch".

Maybe talk more to managers handling Kanban-like Trello boards, to avoid UX mistakes like some of the tools mentioned in the link.

[Brittany Joiner]

@Rafael sorry - what does the movement of the activity button have to do with dashcards and performance on trello? 

[Blair at Atlassian]

A great use case *with utility* for Dashcards! Love it!