Suffering from a slow website? Learn a few practical ways to speed up web application performance.
Digitization has entered our lives seamlessly and in such a way that is hard to separate now. The impact of technology has increased the demands of high-end user experience. The eCommerce, retail, and other service sectors are the main sectors that require sophisticated IT technology to serve the customers in the best possible way. Startups, small, medium, and large enterprises also focus on affordable and functional technologies. Website development is one such feature helping multiple businesses generate online business and brand visibility. Those with the least IT knowledge started their search to find the best web app development companies.
What is web application performance all about?
Web application performance is a measure of the efficiency and quality of services offered by the website application to global users. A person visiting your web application should get nothing less than perfection that is crucial in keeping you floating in the competitive markets. So, how do different businesses measure this performance?
- Performance APIs: Developers have the option to choose from the variety of performance APIs while writing codes for the website applications. The navigation timing API, user timing API, resource timing API, etc., help in the effective recording of the website performance.
- Performance reporting tools: These tools are easy to use as they only require the URL of the website and generates a detailed performance report that is easy to read and interpret.
- Network tools: These tools run against the loaded pages in the browser and help determine their performance. Thus, businesses can get a clear idea of the slowing down features on their web applications.
Why care for about performance?
Website is the silent but most powerful tool of any business that is part of its online sales, marketing, and digital presence footprint. Just like a mutiny can’t succeed with an inefficient leader, a business can succeed with an inefficient website. For example, the average time to fully load a webpage is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile. You can’t be happy with your average website app loading times in and around these figures. Imagine your competitor’s website that has an average time lower than these figures. Thus, a large chunk of your potential customers will switch to efficient website applications if yours is not meeting their expectations.
Web application performance- What does data say?
- Do you know that a one-second delay in the website loading can cause your business a loss of a whopping 2.5 million USD?
- The same one-second delay caused reduced customer satisfaction by 16% and hence reduced lead conversions by 7%.
- Coming to the world of e-commerce, 79% of the online shoppers that faced issues with the web application performance never returned to the same brand.
- Overall, more than 40% of the customers have agreed that they never wait for more than three seconds for the website to load before switching to the second-best option on the search engine.
Top 7 ways to improve the performance of your web application:
After having a check at the relation of the web application and business’s performance, it is mandatory to have a ready list of the best and promising tips to achieve the same. The speed matters as the pages that open within 2 seconds have a usual bounce rate of 9% only, while this rate reaches a whopping 38% for the pages which take more than 5 seconds to load.
So, without much adieu, the following is the top seven ways to improve your web app performance that is proven to be worthy and fruitful for any business:
- Selection of the right tools: It is mandatory, and one of the top tips to speed up your load time is to invest in the right technology. This software doesn’t only capture the metrics but provides detailed analysis. It is easy to fix the bottlenecks in your website environment. It solves the server-side monitoring of all critical web apps. Thus, the simple result is to ensure that the services meet every user’s expectations. The long list of out-of-the-box integrations and plug-ins monitor all about memory, PHP, CPU, network performance, disk, etc. These tools further help companies to go through the code lines causing issues in the application’s performance.
- Use key metrics: Strategies without powerful metrics are of no use to the organizations. Thus, while deciding on the performance of different web apps, it is mandatory to collect and index the key metrics on queries, remote calls, and cache memory. This location of the highly utilized sources and targeted areas helps in channelizing the optimizing factors in the right direction. Thus, it gives a clear insight into the services, options, and tables creating issues for your web applications. Henceforth, the use of key metrics is crucial to improve the performance of your website apps.
- Logging record events: The record events for any website app include multiple offers and critical sale days for the eCommerce. Companies generate valuable data during such record events, and hence it becomes crucial to maintain the data. Multiple tools are available in the IT industry that help them aggregate and display the record event logs to generate valuable insights. These insights are helpful in improving the website performance as it has real-time data with no hypothetical situations. Thus, businesses can manage and resolve the critical issues as guided by the event logs before they actually start affecting the website’s performance.
- Reducing the HTTP requests: The browsers use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests to fetch data from the servers. Loading the JavaScript files makes it easy for the websites to load the content piece by piece, even in cases of multiple HTTP requests. Thus, it takes no mathematical calculations to understand the increased list of HTTP requests causes slow loading of the web pages. Hence, all leading website development services understand the worthlessness of the unused and unnecessary HTTP requests that are a burden on your systems. Thus, while optimizing the website, it is crucial to reduce the HTTP requests that can be achieved by reducing the number of images and further decreasing the size of the usable images.
- Keeping an up-to-date web server: The web server is the best combination of the hardware and software that accepts HTTP requests, and it responds to the requests with the resource content. Thus, an outdated web server can be the silent performance killer of your web application. A server can be a standalone computer or a series of the embedded systems depending on the requirements and functions. The server-side optimization of the web app performance stresses the use of patches. The update currents further help patches to maintain the security and functionality of different web applications. Thus, you can say goodbye to the security threats and lagging updates when your web server is up-to-date.
- File bundling: Just like it is difficult to manage a large number of files in your physical office location, web applications feel difficult to handle multiple files at once. Thus, it is important to minimize the bundle of the files used in the website development. It includes combining different files to reduce the total file number that is achieved using different processes. The removal of unnecessary characters from the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript minifies the bundles. The load time of the website increases automatically as reduced codes are required to run the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files.
- Using Content Delivery Network (CDN): The content delivery network or CDN is the cluster of geographically distributed servers that share data from the closest server according to the HTTP requests. Caching technology is used to store the copies of the file and instant access to the global users. Thus, all crucial functions on your website app, like watching movies, checking bank balance, making purchases, uploading photos, etc., can be achieved without lags. It effectively manages the situation of website congestion that is often unavoidable due to multiple physical concerns. It further protects different website applications from possible security attacks. A CDN is more or less like the instant cash ATM that protects the bank customers from standing in the long queues to withdraw their money from the accounts. Using CDN is the backbone of your website app offers a fast, reliable, and consistent user experience.
Wrapping Up:
It takes no rocket science to understand that web application performance is not a single day’s work and is dependent on several factors. These include web servers, generation of HTTP requests, logging the events, and use of the best technology like CDNs. Thus, any business, irrespective of its volume and budgetary constraints, can optimize web applications that are highly beneficial in generating profitable returns. You can seek guidance from the different web development companies that understand the world of website applications more deeply and technically. The tips mentioned above are helpful in improving the performance of varying website applications quickly and in a streamlined way.
