The performance of a web application can either encourage or deter user interest. Businesses should prioritize performance improvements to enhance the overall user experience and maintain user interest.
Let’s delve into a mixture of development optimization, marketing, and… cognitive sciences? All for the sake of providing a smooth user experience.
What Is Web Application Speed?
This is simple – it’s how fast the website loads when you enter its address. While, as a viewer, you might think not much happens in this short time, it involves a wide array of server communication, information parsing, and visual representation of the result.
Even if your content or services are perfectly tailored to your users’ needs, a poorly optimized website can lead to a negative user experience, ultimately driving visitors away. Therefore, it is crucial to prioritize website optimization in order to provide your users with a smooth, seamless browsing experience.
It’s first important to understand why load speed might be a dealbreaker for your website or online service. Once that is covered, we can get under the hood of the web loading processes and try to tweak them.
Why Is Page Speed Important
The most tempting answer is just to say that we live in a fast world where everything is franchised and everyone wants things to happen right away. That would, however, leave a web owner with just a shrug of the arms. Thus, we need to get more technical.
There are three easily distinguishable reasons that make page load time crucial for one’s enterprise. First is the user experience. Subliminally or fully consciously, people will judge your website over performance, and loading time is their first experience with the site.
The second weighing factor is conversion rates. People are just more likely to bounce off if the page doesn’t load fast enough. This is also tied to several other issues with browsing that we’ll elaborate on below.
The third thing is SEO ranking. Loading time is taken into consideration when calculating your website’s SEO score, thus influencing its SERP position directly. Thus it becomes a matter of technical approach to efficient online marketing.
Web Application Performance Affects User Interest
The speed of a web application directly influences user satisfaction. As previously mentioned, users may disengage from slower websites and seek faster alternatives. In turn, high-performing sites brighten a brand’s image and can retain users for a longer time.
Additionally, it’s noteworthy that these are the times of extensive mobile web browsing. Mobile devices often have limited processing power and slower internet connections compared to desktop computers. If a web application doesn’t perform well on mobile devices, it may lose a significant portion of potential users.
Nobody Likes Slow Loading Web Applications
The internet offers a vast array of websites and services catering to various needs. People abandon websites that are slow to load and switch to a competitor’s site that provides more reliable browsing. With so many options available, users are less likely to tolerate a lazy web page when they can find comparable content or services elsewhere.
Here you can read a case study of Swappie, a refurbished phones retailer that has proven the impact of website performance on conversion rates with solid numbers. The study claims that:
After only three months of work, the impact was clear–Rel mCvR went from 24% to 34% and mobile revenue had increased 42% (sic)
The Appearance of a Fluid Experience
A slow-loading website can create a negative impression of a company or organization. Users may associate slow loading times with outdated technology, poor maintenance, or a lack of professionalism. This perception can undermine trust and credibility, potentially leading to a loss of business or reputation.
Efficient search and filtering options, minimal distractions and clutter, and consistency in design and layout contribute to a fluid browsing experience. These factors collectively aim to provide users with a frustration-free encounter, enabling them to quickly access desired content, complete tasks, and move through the website effortlessly.
What Affects Site Speed Positively?
To make web applications load more efficiently, a website owner and his development team need to assess several technical aspects of the website and take into consideration how they influence perception to avoid the aforementioned distrust. Here are the most crucial notions to look into.
Server Response Time
A fast server response time is essential for delivering smooth browsing. When the server response time is slow, it increases the overall page load time, leading to delayed content delivery. The server response can be sped up by efficient server configurations, optimized code, and proper resource allocation.
Minify and Combine CSS, JavaScript, and HTML Files
In the context of interpreted programming languages such as CSS and JavaScript, minification refers to the process of removing any extraneous characters from the source code, while still maintaining its overall functionality. This involves the removal of white spaces, comments, and new line characters, as well as, in some cases, block delimiters that are typically used to improve the code’s readability.
Additionally, combining CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files can dramatically improve web performance by reducing HTTP requests, allowing more efficient parsing, and improving cache utilization.
Widen The Content Availability
Content Delivery Networks work by caching copies of website content on multiple servers located in different regions. When a user requests a particular piece of content, the CDN serves it from the server nearest to the user’s geographical location. CDNs optimize content delivery by leveraging a network of strategically placed servers, resulting in improved website performance, scalability, global reach, bandwidth optimization, reliability, and enhanced security against certain types of attacks.
How to Identify Performance Issues
To oversee and improve your web application speed, use tools to measure how each component of your website or service is doing. Monitoring tools can find where things are slow or using too much memory or CPU. Look at the server logs to see if there are any errors or things that seem strange that might make things slow.
Test your system with lots of people using it to see if the connection stutters or breaks. If your database is slow, use a dedicated tool to find out why (e.g. SolarWinds for SQL databases).
Depending on the size of your project, your team might have already introduced monitoring solutions, as it’s a standard part of backend maintenance. However, small business owners, beginning startups, and other small-scale endeavors might not have the knowledge and the tools to do so. Fortunately, there are online solutions for that.
Pingdom Website Speed Test
Pingdom Website Speed Test is a tool that analyzes the performance of websites by measuring their load times and providing detailed reports with performance metrics. Users can input a website URL, initiate the test, and receive valuable insights to optimize their site’s speed and improve user experience.
To use the test, you visit the Pingdom tool website, enter the URL of the website you want to test, select a test location, and optionally customize advanced settings like the browser and connection speed. Then, you start the test, and Pingdom analyzes the website’s performance. It then provides a detailed report with metrics such as page load time, page size, and performance grade.
You can review the results, examine the breakdown of page elements, and consider the recommendations for optimizing the website’s speed and performance.
Faster Web App Is Good Business
To fully utilize this knowledge, consider load time cost as a part of the optimization efforts.
Thorough research and analysis will show how load time affects user behavior based on available data or industry studies. For example, you can determine the percentage of users who abandon the site if it takes too long to load or the impact of slow load times on conversion rates, just like Swappie did in the example above.
Assign a value to each performance metric based on the impact of load time. There’s potential revenue loss from a percentage decrease in conversion rate or there might be a decrease in ad impressions due to an increased bounce rate.
Multiply the impact on each performance metric by its corresponding value to estimate the cost associated with slow load times. This can include factors such as lost sales, reduced ad revenue, decreased user engagement, or diminished customer satisfaction.
Additionally, it’s beneficial to take into account the unique characteristics of your web application, such as industry, target audience, and specific goals. Adjust the calculations accordingly to reflect the specific impact of load time on your particular context.
Page Load Times, Tamed
Making all the aspects mentioned above familiar will allow website owners and developers to create an environment where users can seamlessly explore and interact with their content, sparing visitors a slow experience and increasing the overall performance of their web front.
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