How fast is fast enough?

Target Audience: Readers exploring quick and effective means to optimize their website performance.

Fact #1: 

Users/customers expect your webpages to load within 4 seconds. Beyond that you risk losing a client.

Fact #2: 

Surveys indicate, nearly 50% of the users expect your page to load within 2 seconds or less.

Fact #3: 

Nearly 40% of users will wait no more than 3 seconds for a web page to render before abandoning the site.

  • How quickly does your website load?
  • Are your products initially built considering ‘mobile first’?

Do these questions make you feel like you should re-think your product design strategy?

 

Looking for a solution? Let’s explore some optimisation options:

Quick Recommendations [Level: Amateur]

  • Go for responsive designs using ‘Bootstrap’1 (or similar tools).
  • Take a quick assessment to derive how your website appears to search engines. Google page insights2 could tell you a lot.
  • Assess the SSL rating and cipher support. SSL Labs3 allow you to run tests for free.

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optimization

Stability and Optimization Recommendations [Level: Advanced]

  • Insist on building progressive web applications (PWA), if your business demands so.
  • Use frameworks that provide out-of-the-box support for optimization of client-side resources and server-side calls. There are quite a few open source options available.
  • Benchmark your client-side (browser-based applications) and server-side applications (or APIs) to assess further scope for optimization.

Scalability Recommendations [Level: Expert]

  • Content delivery networks (CDN) can be very helpful to speed up your static resources.
  • Consider using micro frontends for your client-side code.
  • Consider microservices for your server-side code.

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References

  1. Bootstrap

  2. Google Page Speed Insights

  3. SSL Labs – ssl test

Note:

  • This article is intended for educational and knowledge sharing purposes only.

  • There is no commercial liability or obligation associated with it. You are free to share this document AS IS without making any changes without written consent of the author.

  • The author does intend to promote or undermine any specific brand, software or device. The views expressed in this article are purely held by the author which may change over a period of time without any liability.

  • By following the instruction(s) in this article (if at all), you are deciding to act on your own and you alone shall be accountable & responsible in case of any loss or damage that you shall incur as a result of implementation of said instructions.