Back
Optimizing Your Web Application Performance
In this article, we’ll explore some of the ways you can optimize your web application performance. We'll also discuss some tools to help you!
In order to function and be used properly, any web app that you build must run smoothly. Optimized web applications also minimize the vulnerabilities of potential attacks by amplifying network functionality, web application performance monitoring, overseeing application protocols, checking network latency and logs, and reviewing the app's code structure. The techniques we’ll discuss in this article add up to amplify the effectiveness of web apps' performance by increasing load speed, causing content to be completely accessible, reviewing status, displaying page size, rendering input, and finding broken links.
We all want our web apps to have lightning-fast response times. But sometimes, despite our best efforts to reduce latency, they can end up sluggish. Let’s talk about how to improve web application performance.
The Importance of Web Application Performance
Web application performance is vital for a variety of reasons. First, it affects the user experience. Slow-loading pages and apps can frustrate users and cause them to abandon your product entirely. Also, web performance is a key ranking factor for search engines. Google, in particular, has stated that site speed is a factor in all of their product algorithms. Short loading times can improve conversions and lead to higher revenue.
We often judge performance on how quickly a web app can load content and respond to user interaction. The goal of an optimized web is for your app visitors to find your app valuable and responsive.
The best way to optimize your web app’s performance is by tracking the system to record and analyze edge-to-edge performance metrics by observing specific network functions. Well-structured performance monitoring tools can detect relevant problems and tackle them before they occur, keeping applications generally optimized, efficient, and businesses proactive.
These are some factors that can affect web application optimization:
Server Performance
Server Location: If users are located far away from the server, performance could suffer.
Page Size: Larger pages can take longer to load.
Scripting or Code-Related Issues: Ensuring that your code is clean and efficient is essential.
Faulty CMS Plugins: It’s essential to keep an eye on your plugins and update them regularly.
10 Pointers for Web App Performance Optimization
The sheer number of web apps in existence today is staggering. With new ones popping up every day, the competition is fierce. To simplify web application development and make sure your web app is performing at its best, there are a few key things you can do. From optimizing your code to making use of caching, follow these 10 pointers to ensure your app is optimized for better web performance.
Use Key Metrics
Optimize based on web application performance metrics. Get started by sweeping your web network records. That way, you can quickly find the services, operations, and issues causing problems within your systems. Once you've located the problem areas, you can offer optimization solutions to known issues instead of blindly improving your web app performance without concrete direction.
Knowing exactly where the problems lie will help you identify and fix them. In addition, understanding your sources of high utilization and tuning your optimization metrics in that direction will save you time.
Reduce File Caching
Use caching and content delivery networks (CDNs) to optimize web performance. Caching improves sluggish load times by storing frequently accessed files locally on a user's device. CDNs also optimize performance by caching static files and distributing files across multiple servers close to your users. This helps reduce traffic on your server and enables your app to load faster.
Minimize the Number of HTTP Requests
Reducing the number of times users can fetch data from a server through unnecessary HTTP requests helps speed up the performance of your application. Always avoid creating unusable and unnecessary HTTP code commands, third-party frameworks, external browser requests, and plugins that will slow down your web speed.
Use Content Delivery Networks
A CDN utilizes geographically distributed servers to store copies of data and work together to perform end-user content requests as they occur. It’s a great way to optimize your web application performance by distributing files across multiple servers. Most files on your website are unchanging and static. The CDN enhances your server bandwidth, speeds up the delivery of your assets, and reduces access latency.
Upload Compressed Files
It’s important to bundle your files before uploading them online. Reduce the number of your files by combining files and clearing unnecessary captions and tags, especially by deleting characters that are unimportant in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. For example, remove new line characters, white space characters, block delimiters, and comments.
The benefit of bundling your files is that it reduces the amount of production code, thereby improving your application load time.
Optimize Images for Faster Loading
It’s best not to rely on CSS to resize your images. Instead, use JPEG and PNG files, as you can easily compress them to fit into your web image structure. Images can reduce your web applications' performance if they are not correctly optimized.
Use Logs to Monitor Performance
Paying attention to your log history will help you detect and fix critical software issues before they cause significant damage to your web app’s performance. In addition, it’s always secure to use logs to monitor the health of your application with the correct log tool.
Use a Browser Extension to Improve Performance
An active browser extension can help to keep your app optimized. A performance-improving extension focuses on the server side and reduces runtime requests to the server. In addition, it enables patches and updates for your web servers, therefore maintaining function and security.
Use a Reliable and Fast Web Hosting Service
An excellent web hosting service will help reduce web performance strains and attacks. Another important thing is to keep an eye on your server resources and ensure that your hosting plan can handle the traffic your app receives. If your web app experiences slow loading times, it may be due to insufficient resources. Upgrading your hosting plan or moving to a more efficient service may be an option.
Choose the Right Tools for Web App Performance Optimization
Picking the proper web application performance monitoring tools to optimize your web application is vital. Consider everything you need for your website, like increasing load speed, rendering content completely accessible, reviewing its status, displaying the page size, rendering inputs, or finding broken links.
Choose optimization tools that offer the best services for your type of app. Unfortunately, you have to pay for most optimization tools; but, some are free for open-source projects.
10 Web App Performance Monitoring Tools
There are many challenges you can come across during web app performance monitoring, including a lack of intelligent alerts, which can lead to attacks on your application. Or, web application performance monitoring can be difficult due to complex web architecture in your app.
Picking the right tool to optimize your application is the solution! There are a variety of performance monitoring tools with great features. The most important thing is picking the one that matches your business needs. Although a few optimization solution tools are free, many, we pay for.
Sematext is an all-in-one log management and monitoring software that provides end-to-end visibility and accurate analytics of your application. They also offer excellent user experience with the Sematext Experience and Synthetics synthetic monitoring tool.
Pingdom is affordable, easy-to-use, end-user-centered monitoring software. You can monitor web applications seamlessly with their unique synthetic features or with real-user monitoring. They also offer an useful troubleshooting system.
Uptime Robot is free(!), user-friendly monitoring software. It's flexible, and users can customize profiles by adding colors and logos or linking custom domains. You can chart view your performance history and more.
TeamViewer Web Monitoring (formerly Monitis) is a cloud-based, all-in-one IT monitoring solution. It has a unique check tool that checks your app frequently for any deviations and sends reports via customizable alerting system. This tool works best with Uptime Monitoring, Transaction Monitoring, and Full Page Load Monitoring.
New Relic Browser helps software engineers monitor their web application performance, view dependencies, troubleshoot instantly, and debug. The New Relic Browser offers a 16-in-1 tool service.
Datadog Synthetics offers freemium services, and it is a sound performance monitoring system that analyzes metrics, traces, and logs in minutes.
Dynatrace offers web app performance and infrastructure monitoring and gives users a 15-day free trial.
Checkly is a 2-in-1 system. They offer an API & E2E monitoring platform for the modern stack: JavaScript.
Calibreapp is designed to automate your web application testing and quickly reports and alerts you of web performance issues.
SolarWinds® AppOptics™ is a web performance optimization software that monitors the server side of your app.
Choosing Software to Monitor your Web App
When it comes to optimizing your web app's performance, monitoring it is critical. But with so many different software options, how do you choose the best one for your needs?
Here are a few tips to help you narrow down your options:
First, consider what features are most important to you. Do you need real-time monitoring? Detailed reporting? Customizable alerts? Make a list of must-haves and then start looking at specific products to see if they offer what you need.
Next, take a look at reviews from other users. What do people like about the software you're considering? Are there any complaints that keep popping up? Again, reading reviews can give you a good sense of whether or not a particular product is right for you.
Finally, ask around for recommendations. Talk to other software engineers and review their tools to optimize their web apps. They may have suggestions that you didn't consider.
With these tips in mind, you should be able to find the perfect software monitoring app to help you optimize your web application performance.
Conclusion
The goals of every web app include giving users an effortless experience, which makes performance important to your business. The right website monitoring service will help you to optimize your application, perform regular tests, provide analysis, supply a content delivery network (CDN), and alert you of issues as soon as possible.
There are many options to choose from when improving your web application performance, ranging from uptime monitoring to transaction monitoring to a handful of web performance monitoring tools so that users can interact with your web app seamlessly. Use the tips and tools discussed above to build the best web app you can!
Looking for more ways to improve? Learn about optimizing your website for SEO as a web developer in this article.
