Eight of the top ten web sites are web portals. The goal of a web portal is to serve as a starting point for users, providing a broad array of resources and services, including news, weather, ready reference, search engines and subject directories, email, chat, and shopping. Web portals allow the user to set their own preferences. Users customize the types and quantity of information fields available to them on their customized portal page, creating a unique user profile. Users can access their customized page from any computer, unlike bookmarks which are not easily portable.
Statistics show that users return to a site more often when it allows customization.
There are drawbacks to web portals. The content is primarily general and newspaper-like, the loading times for popular web portal sites can be very slow, the features vary widely from web portal to web portal, and users don't like to go to the trouble of setting up a customized profile until they feel trust in and loyalty to a site. The limitations of this setup include the slowness of PERL, a lack of scalability, lack of flexibility and limited content, and few interactive options such as online help, chat, or email. In any web portal, IT support commitment is very important, both in initial construction and maintenance. Library and institution support involves demands on the staff in development time, content creation, maintenance, and funding for information feeds and software.