Tips to Boost Your Web App Speed by 10x!
By Shivam Srivastav
October 7, 2017 5 min read
Last update on: December 5, 2017

Web applications are becoming more interactive than ever! Companies are highly cherishing the idea of communicating with the users through a web app and this way, enhancing the digital presence of the brand. In such a scenario, if you are also thinking of developing an app, keep the speed factor into consideration.

The speed of the web application has an immense effect on the success of the app. As per our experience, this factor can make or break the image of your application. It is something that the clients consider more important that all the bells and whistles you must be adding to your application. Don’t you agree? Just have a look at the following statistics:

  • 52% of people consider quick page loading as a way to measure brand loyalty.
  • 40% of users abandon a web application if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
  • 79% of customers who are not satisfied with the web application performance are less likely to visit the same app again.
  • Delay of every 1 second decreases the customer satisfaction by nearly 16%.

Now, as you are familiar with the necessity of high-speed app processing, are you ready to skyrocket your app speed? Before we share ways to enhance the app speed, you must know the current speed of your web app. The best way to do is to use tools like Google Page Speed. These tools give you insights about critical areas of page load speed and empower you to identify ways for improvement.

Ways to Enhance Speed of Your Web App

Follow the tips given below during web app development and increase the conversion rate of your app:

  • Optimize Images

When talking about images, it is always better to use JPEGs over PNGs for logos and other images. This is because the PNG images are heavy and take more time to load, which can eventually lower down the application speed. Secondly, it is necessary to consider the image resolution need, and design images as per that. It is not advisable to upload a 10MB image for your logo if it requires 120px width.

According to our app developers, every image holds some unnecessary data at the backend which can slow down your app speed. So, using tools like Kraken.io is a profitable deal to remove metadata from your images and reduce its size.

You can also take the perks of SVGs for graphics. These images are vector in nature, depict high-quality in all resolutions and are still lightweight. So, you can think of employing these images for icons or logos. But, keep it in mind that storing all images in this format is not an easy task.

  • Eradicate Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS

The Stylesheet is a vital basis for app accessibility, maintainability, customization, consistency, portability, and speed. From our experience, we can say that 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.

web app development

Besides this, you can also look forward to minimizing the CSS and JS files. And zip them for usage. This will reduce the file size and improve the loading speed of your web app.

  • Define Caching Strategies

To boost your app performance, don’t forget to define the caching strategies for the user’s’ browser. The browsers try their best to manage caching, but according to them, it is always safer to avoid caching by default than caching by permission.

Related Blog:- Ways in Which Web Application Development is Changing

  • Prefer Non-bloated and Mobile-first CSS

If your users have older devices, using non-bloated CSS would be a beneficial move for you! This is because the non-bloated CSS reuses the classes to a large extent and thus, lessen the amount of code parsed by the browser. Apart from this, the best app development companies also suggest application of mobile-first CSS. It is based on the idea that the app developers should enclose all the desktop CSS into media queries and keep the mobile as default. Since the mobile device browsers do not parse the code present in the media queries, your app will run faster.

  • Go for Server-Side Rendering

Since not every JavaScript solution offers enhanced server-side rendering in single page apps, it is better to switch to mature ones, like React and Angular2.

  • Employ CDNs

CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers that works with the motive to render content to the users with high availability and performance. It can significantly improve the response times to your assets from the customers across the globe. Hence, you should look upon them.

Finishing Thoughts!

With the increasing trend of mobile apps over the desktop websites, it is much important that you implement the right steps to improve the speed of your web app and outshine the competition. Remember an application with lightning speed can enable you to reserve a special corner in the customer’s mind and soul! And thus, can uplift the conversion rate of your application.

Shivam Srivastav
Shivam Srivastav
Marcom Manager
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