It’s blatantly obvious that slow loading times and awkward interactions in a web application deter users forcing them to seek a better alternative. For years, developers relied on powerful microsoft technologies to develop high performance, interactive web applications. But not all developers always manage to build websites and web apps with the best performance.
That said, this blog will serve as a guide to many web development beginners on improving the performance of a website.
Before attempting to improve the performance of a website, it’s wise to collect a baseline of the web application’s performance. This is to see how the changes to the site are impacting its performance. Sometimes, the changes may do more harm than good reducing the performance. But performance tuning is still recommended as a holistic exercise that will impart deep insights on developers.
The following tips are recommended by our team with years of experience in delivering top-notch ASP.NET development services. The effectiveness of some tips may vary from website to website, and also depends on the nature and scale of the website. So, do take this with a grain of salt.
Reduce HTTP requests
Did you know that a browser pays a tax to open connection to a server?
It does. And the tax is what you call a TCP/IP connection overhead. When there is high latency, it takes quite a long time for the browser to establish new connections. In addition, browsers may also come with a limit on the number of requests they will make to one server at a time. The significance of these connection requests makes it evident that reducing the number of HTTP requests is a great performance optimization tactic.
CSS content should be loaded first
It’s better to load the CSS content of the website first. To understand why, it’s important to understand the nature of browsers – what it is that gives them great speed when downloading web pages.
When downloading pages, browsers attempt to render the application as soon as it has content. This is pretty much a wild guess by the browser as it won’t know what content on the page would go against the guesses it made while downloading the page. If the browser discovers that it has made a wrong guess on the rendering of the page, it will start over again discarding all the work it has done till then. A stylesheet can trigger such a scenario which is why it’d better to avoid having styles that modifies elements that have already been rendered by the browser. This is why loading CSS files first is important.
Image compression
A website without images would be bland and without substance. Experienced web developers often use inline-SVG or CSS tricks to make vector images for web pages. This is because such images tend to be smaller than raster images. Not all developers can make this happen. They can compress the image instead or in their words ‘shrink the image’. Developers can make use of a number of services or plugins for JavaScript build tool to perform image shrinking.
Conclusion
Unlike software development, developing web applications require developers to take a lot of other factors into account including web browsers. Tuning the performance of web apps is much diverse than that of software. The end goal, however, is to satisfy users. Web performance optimization promises a better experience for end-users and better opportunities for the brand itself owing to the impressed app users.
