Let’s talk about the importance of application performance. We know from the experts at Google that application speed has an impact on search engine rankings. Billy Hoffman of Moz explains, “A poor performing website results in a poor user experience, and sites with poor user experiences deserve less promotion in search results”. Slow application performance also makes it difficult to retain existing users. If a user perceives your application as too slow, they will quickly bounce and go elsewhere.

The overall health of your online business is dependent on application performance. Education is the first step towards app performance improvement. Thus, we’ve gathered insights from top app performance leaders to get you started.

4 Solutions to Improve Application Performance

Solution #1: Sequencing is More Important Than Speed

Speed is an important component of overall performance, however, it is not the whole story. Sometimes you must think more about the quality of what you are delivering to the user over how fast you are getting it to them. As stated in a recent Yotaa article, “The simple truth is perception trumps page load time. Meeting user expectations is a complex process, which is why web performance alone is no longer sufficient.” Application sequencing is a technique where on-page elements are displayed in order and time specifically geared toward promoting user engagement.

Solution #2: Optimize your images

Images that have not been optimized can greatly reduce application speed. Mark Isham of Zoompf tells us, “Images that are optimized using lossless methods are visually identical to their original images, just stripped of extraneous metadata that helps to describe the image (useful to the designer, not needed for the end user)”. A simple solution is to minimize the use of PNG files and utilize JPEG files. According to Mark Isham “By utilizing JPEG instead, you often can realize file size savings as large as 80%.” The images will look just as good and you also have the benefit of improving slow application performance. Learn more about how images can affect your application speed in this Yottaa article.

Solution #3: Improve JavaScript Performance

JavaScript is key to creating a modern and engaging user experience. However, JavaScript is also known to be a primary culprit behind slower application load times. To easily check if your JavaScript is causing performance issues, you can simply go to websitetest.com and run a performance test. Alex Pinto of Yottaa said, “We found we could shave a site’s load time down by 33% with just JavaScript concatenation and minification – that’s 1/3 improvement on top of all the other techniques for images, HTML, and others.” If you are looking to improve your application’s load time, investigate how much space JavaScript is taking up.

Solution #4: Poor First/Last Byte Performance:

Your web application cannot finish loading all of its pages until the Time to First/Last Byte metrics has completed loading themselves. To check if your Time to First/Last Byte performance is slow all you need to do is pay another visit to websitetest.com. However, it can be more difficult to figure out what specifically is slow about the first byte and last byte’s performance. “For static content, if your TTFB is more than a few hundred milliseconds, you may have some bottlenecks on your server,” said Jeff Huckaby in a Rackaid article. According to the Rackaid article, you should also check certain hardware features such as Disk IO, Swap Usage, Ram Usage, and Network Bottlenecks. If your hardware is operating smoothly, then you must look into possible software issues. Software problems that can arise could be geographic latency, poorly written side server code, outdated server hardware, overload servers, poorly organized databases, and poorly written database code. It may be a lot to check but Time to First/Last byte performance could be the key to web application performance. Continue to learn solutions here.

To increase sales and conversions you must be able to deliver an easy and enjoyable customer experience. Users will perceive a faster loading time as an easier user experience because they are finding the information they want to see without having to wait. If you are concerned that you are delivering a less-than-satisfying user experience, it may be time for you to look into your web applications’ loading times. Using the solutions listed you will not only be able to boost the speed of your application performance, but you will be able to deliver a more satisfying user experience that your visitors will remember. Learn how poor web performance can affect the ROI of your website and how to calculate this in our Free Ebook: How to Prove the ROI of WPO.