Tips to Boost Your Web App Speed by 10x!

Originally published October 7, 2017, updated September 12, 2019

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 then keep the web app speed factor into consideration.

The speed of the web application has an immense effect on the web app’s performance and also its 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 than all the bells and whistles you must be adding to your application. And you must always provide what users need, in your web app development.

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 speed test your web app 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:

1. Optimize Images

When talking about images, developers suggest that you optimize images for web apps. 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 needed, and design images as per that. It is not advisable to upload a 10MB image how to make web application faster for your logo if it requires a 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, and optimize the web app speed.

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.

2. 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.

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 boost your web app the loading speed of your web app.

3. Define Caching Strategies

To boost your web 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.

4. Prefer Non-bloated and Mobile-first CSS

If your users have older devices, using non-bloated CSS would be a beneficial move for you. It will help in achieving 10x faster app speed 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 the 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, rendering effectual web app development.

5. 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.

6. 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 time to your assets from the customers across the globe. Hence, you should look upon them.

Finishing Thoughts!

With the escalating debate around Mobile web vs Mobile apps, it becomes highly with the increasing trend of mobile apps over the desktop websites, it is important that you implement the right steps to improve your web app’s speed. the speed of your web app , This will not only improve the user experience but also provide you successful web app development, in order to 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.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q. How can I speed up my web application?

There are some tactics that you can use in order to boost your web app. They are:

Optimize the images used on your web app. Try to make them as compressed as possible in size.
Avoid Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS.
Implement well-thought and defined caching strategies.
Employ Non-bloated and Mobile-first CSS
Choose for server-side rendering.
Use CDNs

Q. How can I improve my web app performance?

There are several factors that add up to improve the overall performance of your app. Those factors are:

Try to minimize HTTP requests.
Implement a content delivery network.
Add an Expires or a Cache-Control header.
Boost the speed of your app
Put stylesheets at the top and scripts at the bottom.
Stay away from CSS expressions.
Try to keep JavaScript and CSS external.
Minimize DNS lookups.
Minimize JavaScript and CSS.
Reduce the number of DOM elements.
Eliminate 404s.
Deduct cookie size.
Employ cookie-free domains for components.
Must not scale images in HTML.
Try to make the favicon.ico Small and cacheable.