Salesforce optimization tools are supposed to make your org healthier - but what happens when the tools themselves break? If you've ever opened Salesforce Optimizer only to see a blank screen, hit a "Schedule Not Changed" error, or watched your Org Health Check score drop for no obvious reason, you're not alone. These are some of the most common complaints Salesforce admins post in Trailblazer Community forums, and most don't get clear answers.
Making things more complicated, Salesforce announced the retirement of its Optimizer tool in 2025, replacing it with Org Check. That means the troubleshooting steps you learned last year may not work anymore. In this guide, we'll walk through seven specific optimization tool issues, explain exactly how to fix each one, compare the tools available in 2026, and give you a practical playbook for keeping your org running clean.
A Salesforce optimization tool is any tool - built-in or third-party - that analyzes your Salesforce org's configuration, performance, and security to identify issues and recommend fixes. Think of them as diagnostic scanners for your CRM. They flag unused fields, inefficient automations, permission gaps, and performance bottlenecks that accumulate as your org grows.
Salesforce ships several optimization tools at no extra cost:
Several AppExchange and standalone tools go beyond what Salesforce's built-in options offer:
In August 2025, Salesforce announced that the Salesforce Optimizer tool would be retired and replaced by a new tool called Org Check. The decision came after months of accessibility issues - admins reported blank screens, scheduling failures, and data loading errors throughout late 2024 and early 2025. Reddit threads from that period show widespread frustration, with some users unable to run Optimizer for weeks at a time.
The underlying reason is architectural. Optimizer was built on older infrastructure that didn't scale well with the growing complexity of modern Salesforce orgs. Orgs with thousands of custom objects, hundreds of flows, and complex permission sets were hitting timeouts and incomplete scans. Salesforce decided to rebuild the functionality from scratch rather than patch the existing tool.
Org Check is a community-driven, open-source alternative that Salesforce has endorsed as the go-to replacement. Unlike Optimizer, Org Check runs as a connected app you install in your org, giving it direct API access for faster, more complete scans. Key differences from the old Optimizer:
If you relied on Optimizer reports for quarterly org reviews, here's how to make the switch:
This was the most-reported Optimizer issue in 2024-2025. You'd navigate to Setup > Optimizer, and the page would either stay blank indefinitely or throw a generic error.
Root cause: Typically a browser caching issue, a third-party Chrome extension conflict, or a Salesforce infrastructure outage affecting the Optimizer service.
How to fix it:
This error appeared when admins tried to schedule a new Optimizer run or modify an existing schedule. The system accepted the request but the schedule never actually updated.
Root cause: A backend synchronization issue between Salesforce's scheduling service and the Optimizer engine. This was a known bug that Salesforce acknowledged but never fully patched.
How to fix it:
You deploy a new release to production and your Org Health Check score drops from 85 to 62. Panic sets in - but the score change might not mean what you think it means.
Root cause: Org Health Check recalculates scores based on Salesforce's current baseline, which Salesforce updates with each seasonal release. A score drop doesn't always mean your security got worse - sometimes the baseline got stricter. Other times, a deployment accidentally changed a security setting (like enabling a less restrictive session timeout).
How to fix it:
Lightning Inspector flags components with slow rendering times, excessive re-renders, or too many server round-trips. But sometimes the warnings are misleading — a component might show high render times in the inspector but perform fine for end users.
Root cause: Lightning Inspector measures component performance in a developer context with DevTools open, which adds overhead. It also flags any component that re-renders more than a configured threshold, even if the re-render is intentional (like a real-time dashboard refresh).
How to fix it:
Some third-party optimization tools (and occasionally Org Check) trigger Salesforce governor limits when scanning large orgs. You'll see a "System.LimitException: Too many SOQL queries: 101" error, and the scan aborts.
Root cause: The scanning tool is making more than 100 SOQL queries in a single transaction - Salesforce's hard limit. This happens most often in orgs with complex trigger chains where each metadata query fires cascading triggers.
How to fix it:
Tools like Technical Debt Center or ForeSight sometimes flag metadata as "unused" when it's actually referenced by a managed package, an external integration, or a Visualforce email template that the tool can't see.
Root cause: Third-party tools scan metadata through the Salesforce API, which doesn't always expose references inside managed packages (due to namespace protection) or external systems that query Salesforce fields via API.
How to fix it:
Salesforce Optimizer (and now Org Check) sometimes generates recommendations that are technically valid but operationally irrelevant. For example, it might flag 50 custom fields as "unused" on the Account object - but those fields are populated by a nightly batch job and are critical for downstream reporting.
Root cause: Optimization tools check metadata usage patterns (last modified date, reference count) but can't evaluate business context. A field that hasn't been modified in 6 months looks "unused" to the tool, even if it holds data that's read daily by reports and dashboards.
How to fix it:
Start with Org Health Check for security and Org Check for metadata. Document your baseline scores and the specific issues flagged. You can't measure improvement if you don't know where you started. Export both reports and store them in a shared folder your admin team can access.
Review the flagged items from your Org Check scan. Prioritize by impact: unused Apex classes and triggers first (they consume compile-time resources), then unused custom fields (they clutter page layouts and slow queries), then unused reports and dashboards. Use the 30-day quarantine approach before deleting anything — deactivate first, delete later.
Run Lightning Inspector on your most-used pages. Identify components with rendering times above 300ms — those are the ones users actually feel. Check for SOQL queries inside loops, unindexed filter criteria in list views, and overly complex page layouts with too many related lists. Fixing the top 3-5 bottlenecks often delivers more noticeable improvement than dozens of minor tweaks.
Review your user license allocation against actual usage. At Minuscule Technologies, we've seen orgs where 20-30% of full Salesforce licenses are assigned to users who only need Platform or Identity licenses. Each unnecessary full license costs thousands per year. Use login history reports to identify users who haven't logged in for 90+ days and reassign or deactivate their licenses.
Optimization isn't a one-time project. Schedule monthly Org Check scans and quarterly Org Health Checks. Set up a Salesforce dashboard that tracks your key health metrics over time: API usage, storage consumption, governor limit proximity, and login activity. Assign a dedicated admin (or rotate the responsibility) to review these dashboards and act on trends before they become problems.
The community behind Org Check has been adding features rapidly since the Optimizer retirement announcement. Recent updates include automated priority scoring (so you know which issues to fix first), batch cleanup actions (deactivate 50 unused flows in one click), and export-to-CSV for easier reporting. There's also early work on AI-powered recommendation explanations that tell you why an item was flagged and what the likely impact of fixing it would be - moving beyond the old Optimizer's generic "consider removing this field" messages.
Agentforce, Salesforce's autonomous AI agent platform, now supports org monitoring use cases. You can configure an Agentforce agent to watch for optimization triggers — like storage usage exceeding 80%, a spike in governor limit exceptions, or a sudden drop in page load times - and take automated actions. The agent can create a case for the admin team, generate a summary of what changed, and even recommend specific fixes based on the org's configuration history. This turns optimization from a periodic scan into a continuous, proactive process.
Yes. Salesforce announced in August 2025 that the Salesforce Optimizer tool would be retired. The tool had been experiencing reliability issues (blank screens, scheduling errors, incomplete scans) for months, and Salesforce decided to sunset it rather than continue patching. The recommended replacement is Org Check, a community-driven, open-source connected app that provides similar functionality with faster performance and more granular results.
Org Check is the primary replacement. It's an open-source tool available on GitHub and the Salesforce AppExchange that scans your org's metadata and generates detailed reports on unused fields, inefficient automations, and configuration issues. Unlike Optimizer, Org Check runs as a connected app with direct API access, which makes it faster and more reliable. Salesforce has endorsed Org Check as the go-to alternative, and the Salesforce Admin community actively maintains and improves it.
Salesforce optimization is the process of analyzing, tuning, and cleaning up your Salesforce org to improve performance, reduce costs, and eliminate technical debt. It covers several areas: metadata cleanup (removing unused fields, automations, and code), performance tuning (fixing slow pages, optimizing queries, reducing API calls), license optimization (right-sizing user licenses), security hardening (improving Org Health Check scores), and governance (establishing processes to prevent future bloat). Most organizations benefit from running optimization reviews quarterly using tools like Org Check and Org Health Check.
If your org still has access to Optimizer, navigate to Setup > Optimizer in Salesforce Classic or Lightning. Click "Run Optimizer" to generate a new report. The scan typically takes 10-30 minutes depending on org size. However, since Optimizer is being retired, we recommend switching to Org Check: install it from the AppExchange, grant the required permissions, and run your first scan directly from the app's interface. Org Check provides more detailed results and doesn't suffer from the scheduling and loading issues that affected Optimizer.
The most common Salesforce issues fall into five categories: performance slowdowns (slow page loads, SOQL query timeouts), data quality problems (duplicates, incomplete records, stale data), automation conflicts (triggers and flows stepping on each other), user adoption challenges (teams not using the platform as intended), and technical debt accumulation (unused fields, outdated automations, and orphaned code piling up over time). Regular optimization using the tools described in this guide helps catch and fix these issues before they snowball into larger problems.
Every Salesforce org accumulates technical debt. Fields that nobody uses. Automations that fire when they shouldn't. Permissions that were "temporary" three years ago. The longer you wait to address these issues, the slower your org gets - and the harder it is to untangle.
At Minuscule Technologies, we've helped teams across industries audit, optimize, and modernize their Salesforce orgs. With 160+ Salesforce engineers and a deep bench in org re-engineering, we know how to identify what's slowing you down and fix it without breaking what works. Whether you need a one-time optimization sprint or ongoing managed services, we're here to help your Salesforce run the way it should.
You've seen what's possible. Now, let's make it happen for your business. Whether you need an end-to-end Salesforce solution, a complex integration, or ongoing managed services, our team is ready to deliver.
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