Useful Tips on Speeding up Your Web Application

Major online search engines like Google use loading speed as a key metric while ranking websites on their search engine results pages. Likewise, a large percentage of users nowadays abandon websites which take more than 3 seconds to load. Hence, the speed of a web application directly affects its search engine visibility and user experience. While building a web application, you must focus extensively on its loading speed to get regular visitors and convert the visitors into customers. You can easily boost the speed of your web application by using a number of simple tricks.

12 Simple Tricks to Make Your Web Application Load Faster

1) Host Media Files on a Content Delivery Network

You can always consider hosting media files on a content delivery network (CDN) to increase website speed and reduce bandwidth consumption. The CDN will further reduce the number of concurrent user requests sent to the website. Also, the website content and files will be hosted on a network of servers spread across the world. Each time a user accesses your web application, the file will be downloaded from a server closest to his region. Hence, the CDN will make the users access your website in 3 seconds.

2) Reduce Number of HTTP Requests

A web page has to download a variety of files –scripts, images, videos and style sheets – while responding to user request. It has to send individual HTTP requests for each file. The number of HTTP requests consumes about 80% of the website’s response time. Hence, you must reduce the number of HTTP requests sent by a web page by streamlining the on-page content, reduce number of scripts, combine stylesheets, and using stylesheets instead of images. You must explore ways to keep the website lean to make it load faster.

3) Reduce Server Response Time

In addition to reducing the load speed of the website, you also need to explore ways to reduce the server response time. You can easily determine the server response time by using a number of online tools. However, you must identify and eliminate all bottlenecks to reduce the server response time to less than 200 milliseconds. The reduced server response time make your website keep visitors engaged.

4) Optimize Images

Unlike scripts and stylesheets, images take more time to load. Also, the loading time of each image depends on its format, size, and source attribute. You can easily enhance the web application’s speed by removing image content. Also, you can optimize website speed by choosing the right image format (JPEG or PNG), reducing colour depth, and cropping images. It is also important to embed images into a web page only through the src attribute of <img> HTML tag. You must resize the images before uploading them, and use the right HTML tag attributes to embed them into web pages.

5) Minify HTML, JavaScript, and CSS Files

Like images, the content developed with HTML, CSS and JavaScript also affects the website speed adversely. Often the unstructured and lengthy code makes the website load slowly. Hence, you must minify these front-end files to make the website load faster. There are a number of tools that enable you to minify the JavaScript and CSS files without putting extra time and effort. Likewise, you can easily minify and optimize the HTML content by using a Chrome extension called PageSpeed Insights.

6) Enable Gzip Compression

In addition to minifying the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, you also need to compress the content delivered to the users at server end. You can always enable Gzip compression to get the content compressed at the server level before delivered to the browser. The Gzip compression increases website speed significantly by reducing bandwidth consumption. Also, you can enable Gzip compression by adding a simple code snippet to the web server files.

7) Enable Browser and Server Caching

You have option to enhance website speed by enabling different forms of browser and server caching. Once you enable browser caching, the web browser will deliver the page quickly to users without downloading HTML document, JavaScript files, CSS stylesheets, images and other components repeatedly. Some CDNs even allow users to implement varying browser caching efficiently. Also, you can increase the website speed by implementing the server-side caching techniques and plug-ins provided by popular CMS.

8) Keep the Database Clean

The user experience delivered by a website also depends on the amount of time required to access, retrieve, and deliver information from the database. You must keep the database structured and clean to make the website load faster. It is always important to assess the database and remove unnecessary tables on a regular basis. Likewise, you can make the applications access data quickly by creating indexes. Each relational database management system (RDBMS) further provides you with a number of performance tuning features. You can implement the performance tuning options to make the website load faster.

9) Avoid Unnecessary Redirect

You can always take advantage of redirects to enable website visitors to access relevant content. But you must not forget that each redirect creates an additional HTTP request. The additional HTTP requests direct affect the loading speed of your website. Hence, you must avoid unnecessary redirects to make the website load faster. Also, you can consider making the redirects responsive by using the techniques recommended by Google. The redirection techniques will enable you to make users access relevant content without affecting the website’s speed.

10) Get All 404 Errors Fixed

Normally, a 404 error depicts a missing file. But the amount of resource required to generate 404 errors differ from one platform to another. There are certain platforms like Drupal that require additional memory to get the server deliver 404 errors efficiently. You can easily identify the 404 errors in the website by using several plug-ins and external services. But you must identify and eliminate all 404 errors to make the website load faster without consuming additional server resources.

11) Don’t Use Too Many Plug-ins

Many content management systems (CMS) enable the web application developers to build website rapidly by using a variety of pre-defined themes, plug-ins, and extensions. You can take advantage of the free and commercial plug-ins to add feature and functionality to the website without writing additional code. But you must remember that plug-ins often affect the website speed, along with causing crashes and similar technical issues. After developing the website, you must check the quality of all plug-ins used by it. Also, you need to remove the irrelevant and unnecessary plug-ins to make your website load faster.

12) Perform Load Testing

You can easily identify the bottlenecks affecting the speed of your website adversely by performing elaborate load testing. While performing load testing, the testing professionals will evaluate the website’s performance and behaviour under varying load conditions. Based on the load testing report, you can easily identify the factors that impact the website’s behaviour and speed under peak load conditions. Also, you can repair the bottlenecks identified during load testing to make your website load faster.

You can easily check the overall speed of your website by using a number of online website speed test tools. But you must remember that the loading speed of a website is affected by a number of factors. There are always chances that its speed may be decrease due to minor changes made to the website content and structure. Hence, you must monitor the website speed continuously, and optimize its speed to accomplish higher conversion rate.