Talking about the digital experience, the future of the web is all about personalization. It needs users to experience a consistent and optimized performance throughout their virtual journeys. Be it an eCommerce application or any customer-facing service website, lack of functionality hampers the entire process of generating sales.  

As per the reports, “It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave.” Thus, a web application that is not optimized and tested for performance is likely to fail to retain the users and therefore collapse. On the other hand, creating a solution that is made to deliver a uniform user experience could help any business to fetch exponential success.  

Since your web software product determines the fate of your business by directly affecting its credibility and client acquisition rate, it is vital to create technologies that are made to impart performance. Keeping the thought in mind, this blog will underline the most important metrics and factors that can help create a high-performing web software.  

Important factors for creating a strong online impression with your web software product.  

Checklist to consider to make sure that your web software product deliver high productivity includes

1. Aligning With The Performance Metrics  

When aiming to derive maximum output with your web software performance, it is crucial to know what metrics must be focused on. These primarily include: 

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Used to measure loading performance of the web software, the target time is usually 2.5 seconds post click.  
• FID (First Input Delay): Used to measure instructiveness, and the FID value needs to be 100 milliseconds or less.  
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Defining the visual stability of web apps or software, the ideal value for CLS should be 0.1 or less.  

Overall, the web software or application needs to meet 75 percent of the aforementioned metrics in order to deliver ideal performance.  

2. Cutting HTTP Requests 

Since web solutions use HTTP requests to fetch content like images, stylesheets, and scripts from the server, it is vital to keep things streamlined for overhead issues. Too many requests could overwhelm the server and the system causing major performance issues.  

Therefore, any unnecessary requests must be eliminated by working over JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, or fonts. The process should aim to contain only those HTTP requests that are necessary.  

3. HTTP to HTTP/2 Transition 

Being a more powerful version of the protocol, transitioning to HTTP/2 allows improved web performance. The transition may need you to approach your web hosting provider to help you shift from HTTP to HTTP/2. Some of the potential benefits that switching to HTTP/2 could offer include: 

• Reduced latency with request and response multiplexing 
• Compressed HTTP header fields to prevent overheads 
• Request prioritization 
• Added protocol enhancements for maximized performance 

4. Image Size Optimization  

Most of the time, it is the extensive graphic content on the web app that can hamper performance. However, it is crucial that any graphic content should be displayed well over high-density displays. Since the use of high-resolution graphic content may hamper the speed, it is necessary that visuals must be optimized for different devices and appropriate resolutions.  

5. CDN (Content Delivery Network)  

As your website or web app may need to cater visitors from different geographical locations, any user that is distant from your server could experience extensive load times. Such issues could appear more frequently for static files like CSS, images, or JavaScript files. However, aligning with a CDN or Content Delivery Network could help streamline things for maximum performance.  

There are CDN providers like Akamai and Rackspace CDN that can help you process static files from geographically distant servers, cutting any delays or lag.  

6. Mobile First Rule  

A common mistake that most developers or IT solution providers tend to make with creating new web solutions is optimizing for desktop while negating the mobile experience.  

The developers, designers, and web testing solution providers need to understand that testing for mobile is important and harder than testing for desktop. It is necessary that mobile devices must be focused to overcome performance bottlenecks as it can even help simplify the task of desktop optimization. 

7. Improving Server Processing Time  

The concept of improving the server processing time is all about cutting the TTFB I.e. Time To First Byte. TTFB defines the time taken by the browser to get the first byte of data from the server and therefore helps improve the server performance. Some of the important factors that can help advance the server processing time can be: 

• Stick to the guidelines shared by server frameworks to align with the app logic of web servers.  
• Time to time review of how the server queries the database and helps with the improvement. 
• Ensure server hardware upgrade to capture computational resources.  

8. Picking The Perfect Hosting Plan  

Based on your performance goals and app requirements, make sure you choose the perfect hosting plan. Some of the possible options that you might consider to choose include:  

• Shared hosting: Shared hosting involves sharing computing resources with fellow customers. It makes the hosting plan cheap and may lead to performance issues.  
• Virtual Private Server: VPS are comparatively faster than shared hosting and therefore you need to pay more.  
• Dedicated Servers: These are expensive but allow you to configure as per your requirements for maximum performance.  
• Serverless: Serverless plans are made for those who need scalability but at low costs.  

9. Gzip Compression To Prevent High Load Time  

Gzip compression on HTTP servers allows you to save the load time and minimize the size of HTTP requests. It, therefore, helps improve the page load time. Many web hosting service providers allow you to experience Gzip compression using cPanel while you can even opt for the option where the hosting provider works Gzip compression for you.  

10. JavaScript & CSS Minification  

Another great move you can choose for improving app performance is by reducing the parallel network requests. The process would require you to work on the following factors: 

• Optimize the JavaScript & CSS files by shortening symbols and work on minification 
• Combine different CSS files and JavaScript into bundles 
• Create various different bundles by sticking to the above process.  

11. Asynchronous JavaScript Loading 

When we talk about synchronous loading, the term defines the loading of the JavaScript completely before rendering. However, it is recommended to perform asynchronous loading of JavaScript to allow parsing of a webpage while JavaScript is loading. Ultimately, it helps to improve the performance of the website.  

12. Plugin Use On CMS (Content Management System) 

If you are creating a web solution with the help of an open-source CMS, it is very likely for the developers to get carried away with the use of plugins and themes. Though these plugins allow users to enjoy a variety of functionalities, it can even lead to overheads.  

From loading of additional JavaScript files to CSS, the use of plugins may trigger the TTFB. Thus, it is vital that every plugin must be reviewed for its use to ensure it can be easily added or removed to complement the performance goals.  

13. Cloud-based Automated Performance Testing 

When aiming to create high-performing web software, it never happens to be a one-time process. It needs a well-informed team of ISTQB-certified testers who can monitor the QA metrics related to performance.  

Once you have the right team on board, it only needs you to work on monitoring application logs. It may appear to be a tough task but using the right set of cloud performance testing tools could do the job. SOASTA, LoadStorm, and Blazemeter are some popular examples of cloud performance testing tools to follow.  

14. Website Caching 

The entire concept of implementing caching works around files stored in a temporary location in order to overcome unwanted bandwidth consumption and latency. Therefore, caching can be implemented to enhance the performance of the web application or software using various techniques. These include: 

• Network Caching 
• HTTP Caching 
• Reverse Proxy Server Caching 
• Database Caching 

15. Web App Optimization To Overcome Performance Bottlenecks 

When you are aiming to maximum performance output from your web application or software, it needs you to optimize the product for different benchmarks. These include factors like: 

• The application code must be designed to use minimum data in every session 
• The application must be crafted to avoid running out of memory  
• The applications must use native SQL queries to avoid queries running on loop. 

16. Right Development Tool Selection  

In order to yield maximum output from your web application, it becomes necessary to align the right set of web development and web testing tools. Also, you must consider the web automation testing framework along with the web development framework. 

Some good frameworks or library options that you might want to consider for high-performance development include: 

• Vue.js 
• Preact.js 
• React.js 
• Flutter 

17. Load Time Optimization 

Another important factor that can help you develop a high-performing web software product is choosing the perfect format for your content goals. Be it the selection of high-resolution graphics or the use of PNG files, it is all about achieving the highest visual quality without affecting the system components.  

For instance, developers could try using SVG format for icons and logos while large GIFs could be replaced with looped videos. 

18. Reduced API Calls  

If the web application you made is making multiple API calls to retrieve any data needed, it is very likely to hamper the performance. Therefore, developers prefer working on REST or Representational State Transfer for optimized API development which may need a system to work on multiple REST API calls to get the data.  

Some developers even use GraphQL in place of REST, as it allows fetching all the data in a single request while cutting over-fetching.  

The Crux 

Concluding it all, a slow-performing web software solution can only lead you to slow business or maybe no business in the worst-case scenarios. Besides, slow speed acts as micro stops to your business hampering the overall performance of your operations and thus the end-user experience. 

Therefore, it is always a good move to work on all the possible failure cases at the earliest to discover the system issues that can cause inevitable delays and stress. More importantly, working on all the above-defined performance improvement factors could help you cut any downtime and drive massive revenue to your business.  

After all, Performance is vital to creating high-availability web software products, and the ability to achieve that within the load could do wonders in terms of customer acquisition, retention, and overall sustainability.