The advancements have left people devoid of patience. If one thing takes time, they easily migrate to its alternative to get done with the work. Hence, expecting your users to wait a long time, until your website downloads, is only going to let you down. The users will switch and resort to some other website for getting their work done. 40% of the users will leave if your web app takes more than two seconds to load. This will reduce the traffic on your website and pass it to your competitor’s site. Therefore, optimizing the performance of websites or web apps is the topmost priority of all businesses.
Let us look at some tips that you can use as tactics to improve your web app’s performance.
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Compress large data items
It is the large data items that take a lot of time in loading which in turn increases the load time of your web app. So, compressing such data items can drastically reduce the load time and improve the performance of your web app. Moreover, the bandwidth requirement of text-based contents – HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. can also be reduced to see the improved impact. There are numerous compression standards available for various types of data such as images, videos, texts, audios, GIFs, etc. GZIP is both, a method of compression and a file format, and it has different compression procedures for different servers – Apache, Nginx, Litespeed, etc. The compression can improve the performance at lightning speed and will gift you raving reviews by the users. This will be a boon for areas that have poor or limited internet connectivity.
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Balance the traffic load
Heavy traffic on a single server can affect the performance of the web app. Hence, it is advisable to use a load balancer to not only distribute the traffic but also improve the security. You might have many web servers and each of those can be of good capacity. But having just that does not solve the problem. A load balancer is completely different and more purposeful. Load balancers, apart from balancing the load, also improve the user experience for the web apps that have not been written optimally. The scalability issues can also be solved and that too without modifying even a single line of code or server configuration. Now, as the traffic will be equally distributed across the servers, one of the servers will not be burdened heavily while others are idle. NGINX can be used as a load balancer.
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Caching as a solution
Caching is a technique to speed up the delivery of content on your website. Caching can be achieved in the following ways:
- Use some CDN (Content Delivery Network) to store your content for faster and efficient delivery.
- Use faster devices to store your content.
- Make content available faster upon demands
You can even use all these three strategies together. You can cache both – static and dynamic content. The image files, JavaScripts, etc. are not changed for a long time – so they can be called static content. While the HTML requests or files that change often can be called dynamic content. As you have cached content, for every new request, a server is not to be allotted as the data is already cached. So, no need to load a fresh page unless you have made some modifications. For every 100 requests, caching would handle 90 requests. The fresh content is loaded only for 10 requests. This improves the performance of your web app significantly.
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Load JavaScript asynchronously
Nowadays, most of the websites are integrated with content from third-party sources – social media, commenting service, information feed service, chat service, etc. So, the crashing of those sources can affect the loading of your website. Now, loading such JavaScript asynchronously will not hinder the loading of your web app. Only the portion with that script will not load, but the rest of the services will still be available. Having a partial service provided is better than no service at all. For this reason, the performance of your web app improves amazingly.
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Benefit from Key Metrics
Take assistance of key metrics to reckon which sources have high utilization and based on that mould your efforts for performance optimization. To find the bottleneck services on your web app, use the techniques of indexing metrics on caching operations. After having traced the areas of problems, you can start solving them to improve the performance. Trying to optimize the whole web app in one go, aimlessly, will not help in solving the issues.
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Bundle your files
Reducing the total number of files by optimizing the content in them will better the performance. So, you should aim at bundling the files and minify them too. Combining the files and forming a big, optimized compilation file is called bundling. On the other hand, minifying files includes reducing the size of individual files by optimizing content in them. You can remove extraneous JavaScript, CSS, HTML files that are not required for loading. Moreover, the unnecessary characters – newline characters, block delimiters, white spaces, comments, etc. should be removed. Now, as doing so reduced the amount of code to be requested from the server, the loading speed boosts and overall performance of the web app improves.
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Keep your software versions up to date
You must have used the best possible set of software at the time of building your web app. Now, there are timely updates in the versions of software for fixing bugs and improving performance. As the updates leverage on compiler optimizations, they are more compatible with the advancements in hardware and other technology. So, updating versions of the software will give you enhanced capabilities.
Conclusion
The aforementioned tips can be used either one by one or in any combination and the improvement in the performance of your website will be vividly visible. There are many other techniques too; some of which include updating servers, reducing HTTP requests, learning from logs, etc. So, use such strategies and see the improvement not only in the performance of your web app but also in the profit earned by your business.