Date
25 Nov 2022
Author
Thomas King
People’s attention is a limited resource, by optimising your web app for speed, your users will thank you for it, and here's how to do it.
Web App spped is important.
Users want answers and results and they want them at lightning speed. An extra-second delay can have a significant impact on the overall performance of your application, from customer satisfaction and conversion rates to the search engine ranking position.
According to Google, if your page takes more than 3 seconds to load, over half of the users will abandon it and go elsewhere.
The research also showed that 70% of the 90,000 websites it analysed took almost 7 seconds for the above-the-fold content to display.
Luckily, there are a number of steps you can take to optimise your web app for load speed and outpace your competition. In this post, we will guide you through the second half of them, if youve yet to read the first five tips check it out here!
Without further ado…
6. Eradicate Render-Blocking JavaScript and CSS
The stylesheet is a vital basis for app accessibility, maintainability, customisation, consistency, portability, and speed. If you use non-blocking assets and let users fetch and render HTML markup before the CSS is downloaded and parsed, you can improve the user experience. The same rule applies to JavaScripts. Besides this, you can also look forward to minimising the CSS and JS files and zip them for usage. This will reduce the file size and boost the loading speed of your web app.
7. Focus on Mobile Devices First and Then On Desktop
Do you try to optimise your website for desktop first, and then look at the mobile user experience? Optimising the user experience, including the performance of mobile devices is harder.
Focus on mobile devices first. Remove common performance bottlenecks and test the site on mobile devices. You can then easily optimise it for the desktop later.
8. Use GZip Compression to Reduce The load Time of Your Web Application.
You should implement GZip compression on your HTTP servers to reduce the load times of your site. This minimises the size of HTTP responses in many instances. In turn, that improves the page load times.
9. Implement Website Caching
Implementing caching involves a version of files in a temporary storage location to reduce latency and bandwidth consumption. You can use it for web application performance improvement. Consider the following caching techniques:
- Network Caching
- HTTP Caching
- Reverse Proxy Server Caching
- Database Caching
10. Speed Up Database Queries with Indexing
If your database queries are taking too much time to be resolved, it is time to look for ways to speed up your database. Every database and data model carries its own trade-offs. Database optimisation is a subject of its own, data models, database types, specific implementation options, etc. Speedups may not be easy. Here’s a tip, however, that may help with some databases: indexing. Indexing is a process whereby a database creates fast-access data structures that internally map to keys (columns in a relational database) that can improve the retrieval speed of associated data. Most modern databases support indexing. Indexing is not specific to either document-based databases nor relational databases.
Conclusion
You can improve your web application performance rapidly by using these tips, even if you start one at a time. By the time you are done blending in these optimisations, you should have seen a significant jump in traffic, engagement, conversions, and even revenue!
Start by compressing your data and monitoring your site’s traffic. You’d start noticing what you need to improve. You may want to introduce a load balancer then, optimize your security protocols and start caching.
Of course, you should always use the best-in-class, appropriate software and make sure you update them when newer patches or versions are released. Another natural step you can take now is to start monitoring when your site is up (or down).
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