How to improve web app performance?

Probably every Internet user has once given up on visiting a website because it was loading too slowly. That’s why no one needs to be convinced that the performance of web applications is a very important issue, especially for companies and businesses that are profiting from gathering a large audience. Slow sites not only have fewer visits but also lower search rankings. After all, every company wants to be as visible as possible, right?

Currently, many people check the offers of the businesses they are interested in, using mobile devices. With the help of well-designed sites, online shopping can be done practically at any time, anywhere. All you need is a phone, the Internet, and… a fast and efficient application that encourages you to use it. That’s why it’s a great idea to constantly improve your mobile apps so that they meet the expectations of their users and provide the very best experience. 

Achieving a company’s business goals is not the only reason to be interested in methods to improve the performance of web applications. An efficient application becomes more future-proof, helps save hosting costs, and reduces its CO2 footprint (if you’re interested in how to build applications in a green way, read our article on the subject).

Here are 6 ways to improve web application performance that we think are worth considering:

Connect files

One simple and effective optimization method is file minification. It involves reducing the size of individual files but also combining them to reduce their overall number. The primary method of minification is to remove unnecessary characters that do not need to be loaded from HTML, CSS, or JavaScript (examples are whitespace characters or newline characters). In this way, minification reduces the amount of code required from the server, which affects the loading time of the page. Reducing the files and their number is an effective optimization method that will certainly help improve the performance of a web application. 

Server upgrade 

An outdated server may be contributing to the performance degradation of a web application more than we think. It is the server that is responsible for making us wait a fraction or a few seconds for the next page to appear after we click on a link. So it’s worth remembering to do things like updating the version of the PHP interpreter on your server. Usually, each new version of PHP is faster than the previous one. Optimizations in PHP come from observing its use cases and reported problems. Also, make sure you have the highest possible database version. This is a way to minimize the number of simultaneous connections and the execution time of MySQL queries. As with PHP, each successive version is usually more efficient. Implementation of these techniques usually occurs when a site is published or optimized.

Optimization of graphics and multimedia

The biggest impact on the loading speed of websites is files of large size. So be sure to properly optimize all elements placed in the application. Scale image files and place them at their original size instead of scaling elements using width and height. If you store large amounts of static files, move them to a file server or integrate the service with cloud solutions. Because such services don’t use cookies, and they are optimized to serve files, each file can be downloaded a little faster. Also use a lazy load solution, which is a method where only the image at the top of the page is seen on the screen. Everything else can download in the background, only after you scroll down to those photos. In this way, the photos that will be viewed later will not block the loading of the key elements of that page at the start, namely the text, fonts, and photos that are at the very top.

Take advantage of the SPA approach

And we don’t mean a wellness center 🙂 Single Page App relies on the fact that all resources are downloaded when you first visit the site or are dynamically downloaded in the background while using the app only when necessary. The SPA approach really helps to speed up pages with the help of reducing network loads, so it is worth considering. To create pages based on the SPA approach, tools such as AngularJS, Vue.js, and React are used.

AMP

AMP means Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it is an open-source project created by Google. Its goal is to create websites whose speed is maximally optimized on mobile devices. The initiative has developed specific standards for designing sites, so they can be attractive and run quickly on all mobile devices. AMP sites are created in three ways. The best option is to create an AMP site from scratch, but you can also build one using a wizard or CMS plugin.

HTTP/2

The HTTP/2 protocol has recently been developed to speed up the parallel loading of more than one file. So this is an update worth keeping in mind, as it may help solve some of the performance problems of web applications.

The more performance the better

Is it worth investing your time in optimizing web applications? According to a study reported by Kissmetric, as many as 40% of users quit pages they can’t load within three seconds. This result speaks quite strongly in favor of trying to help the performance of your product as much as possible.

Of course, there are many methods of optimizing web applications, and the ones we have described are not even the tip of the iceberg. However, it is worth awakening an interest in techniques that benefit application performance in order to manage them in an informed manner. Such thinking is sure to bring many benefits to your business. If you’re wondering how you can support your web application, our Applover team would be happy to provide you with substantive advice, just contact us!