How Poor Web App Performance Drives Customers Away

There have been times when you visited a website to buy a specific product or examine a service but left when the website failed to load correctly. Such situations have occurred in our lives, which is scary from a business’s POV.

They are losing potential sales because the website did not load within a few seconds. Time is of such essence today that a few seconds can make or break any business.

When the web page does not load in the expected time, it can be understood that the website did not scale according to the user requirements or had performance issues.

What is Web Optimization?

Web app optimization is one solution that specifically caters to the problem of slow loading. It boosts the app’s speed and responsiveness by 45%. This optimization lets your customers have a better experience with the app, supported by research. Optimizing the web app also makes the search engines happy, so your business will grow exponentially. The article discusses the fundamental issues that impact web app performance and provides actionable solutions to resolve such issues.

Real-Life Examples Showing that Web App Optimization Matters

Business loses their business when the web app does not perform optimally; some surveys prove the same. The list shows some significant brands that benefitted from web app optimization.

1. Google - The tech giant regularly optimizes its search engine and web services and benefits from speedy page loading, improved search result relevance, and user experience.
2. Amazon- The company has dramatically optimized its websites and mobile app. This optimization has resulted in its massive success as an online retailer. Source - Amazon Annual Report
3. Netflix- The company has become a global leader in streaming entertainment since it optimized its devices and networks.

Reasons for Poor Web App Performance

Customers can navigate away from your web app when they do not have a good time using it. Just a second or two can make or break a customer’s expectations. The following points highlight the major issues that lead to poor web app performance and give ways to address them.

1. Third-Party Integrations

A business web app may offer services that involve third-party integrations like collecting forms, making donations, and more. Such integration hinders seamless customer transactions because of increased network requests, resource-blocking resources, and dependency management issues.

To resolve these issues, minimize the number of integrations on your web app. Optimizing the resource loading, regular reviews, and asynchronous loading for critical issues.

2. Complicated Navigations

Every user wants smooth navigation on your web application, and complex displays spoil the user experience. The navigation design with hidden navigation elements, unfamiliar icons, no visible indicators or progress signals, and an inconsistent interface gets uninstalled by the users before getting any chance.

To resolve these issues, it is advised to understand website navigation and follow the best navigation practices carefully. A few such practices include making important information visible and accessible, creating separate designs for each screen, and adding breadcrumbs for the user.

3. Server Load

Server load is responsible for making the web application responsive and reliable. It is the amount of workload on a particular server and includes types like traffic load, data request load, and processing load. The server load increases as the traffic increases or too many apps start running at a given time.

You can examine the speed of your web app on Google Page Insights. Following certain practices like upgrading to eco-friendly servers, increasing the RAM, choosing a green hosting plan, and cleaning the messy code can reduce the server load for delivering a superior online experience.

4. Network Congestions

We all have experienced traffic jams; network congestion is similar. It happens when the data transmission demand exceeds the available network resources. The congestion often leads to packet loss, lack of space in the buffer memory, and server performance degradation.

Steps like end-to-end network monitoring, utilizing tools like Obkio, detecting core network metrics, using Quality of Service (QoS), and packet prioritization can help resolve network congestion.

How Optimized Web Apps Help Business?

Poor scalability results in poor web app performance, significantly affecting the user experience. Some ways this impact is made are listed below, along with suggestions to minimize them.

1. User Frustration

It is recommended that your web app has a high lighthouse score above 70 so it does not end up frustrating your customers. You can check it on the Google Lighthouse.

Suggestions

Reducing page bloat, optimizing the images, following progressive web app standards, using on-demand loading, and minimizing custom fonts help manage user frustration. Delivering a good user experience will help businesses improve their conversion rate, boosting business.

2. Bounce Rates

An average website loads in 1.6 seconds, which is a decent speed. However, as soon as this time increases by merely a second, the user loses interest and moves to (bounce) the next best thing that catches their attention. There are various studies and expert insights that suggest the same. A low lighthouse score means a high bounce rate, showing any business's lost opportunity.

Suggestions

Know that if you have a bounce rate between 30-50, it is considered excellent; check here. Understanding visitor's mindsets, making the web app responsive, delivering better UX, having a clear CTA, and doing some A/B testing can contribute significantly to achieving the same.

3. Conversion Rates

Plenty of web apps deliver products and services similar to your business. It is factual that not all of these web apps will perform optimally. Reasons like your brand could be more memorable, your homepage having a high bounce rate, complex product pages, and confusing search results often lead to a low conversion rate.

Suggestions

You can fix the issue by addressing the problem and better positioning your brand. Start by creating phrases for communication that set you apart from your competitors. Practice a few steps like defining the products clearly, being transparent about the USP on the homepage, putting product recommendations with review snippets, examining user browser behavior, and displaying results accordingly.

Importance of User Experience

User experience remains vital for any business’s growth and is primarily associated with the performance of applications. Designing UX to please the customers guarantees increased interaction with your products and services.

The web app should avoid frustrating the customers with unnecessary or complex registration or sign-up forms. A smooth user experience results in a higher conversion rate. The listed steps can help you deliver an excellent UX.

1. Use an interaction form to know what the consumers think about your website forms so you can improve those. Hotjar works well for this purpose.
2. Learn how customers navigate your web app; this will help you learn about the products and services that are gaining popularity. Crazy Egg is one such tool that can help gain these insights. Leaving breadcrumbs will help them navigate through the app seamlessly.
3. Regularly conduct usability testing to understand the areas that need improvement. Several tools can help you with this, and UserZoom is one such tool.
4. Examine the metrics like page views and time spent on a page.
5. Measure the customer success. Knowing how many customers are buying the products or services is vital. Understand their journey to know what is working and what isn’t. Use Quarloo for conducting such a survey.

Team’s Performance for your Web App Performance

It is essential to invest in people; after all, that makes or breaks any business. Learn what drives your staff so you can avoid significant losses.

One person’s performance can create a ripple effect, significantly impacting the team’s performance and damaging the company. All the major brands know it and use this information to their advantage.

They understand that people working for them will help them gain a competitive advantage, maintain their brand reputation, and mitigate revenue losses. They know that a good leader will lead intellectually to yield excellent results from their team. Listed points help influence team performance.

1. Team composition and skill- Open and transparent communication channels are crucial for collaboration and understanding. Hiring a team with diverse skills and product management capabilities helps bring different perspectives and problem-solving.
2. Team culture and dynamics- A positive team culture fosters creativity and ownership.
3. Project management and planning- Set clear and defined goals and have a structured project plan.
4. Agile development practices- Ensure implementation of agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban to allow flexibility and continuous improvement.

Best Practices for Your Web App Optimization

There are several practices that, when done, can optimize web applications, helping your web app load better. A few such prominent practices are listed below.

1. CDNs

Content delivery networks are designed to distribute static content across different servers. The practice helps reduce latency, improves bandwidth efficiency, and optimizes content delivery. There are several CDNs in the market, such as CloudFlare Polish and Fastly IO, so you should research them before selecting one.

2. Browser Caching

It is a technical way of storing frequently accessed resources locally on a user’s device. The practice reduces the need to fetch resources from the server occasionally. This storage helps access files faster, load faster, and deliver a better user experience. Check which files are cached on a website and learn about their expiration.

3. Server-side Caching

It is another caching technique where the frequently accessed files are stored on the server. The practice reduces the need to recreate or fetch data from a database or any other source whenever a user requests. It uses expiration policies to expire the data after understanding when it should be invalidated. You can opt for a renowned server-side host for this purpose.

4. Image Optimization

The method reduces file size, uses responsive image techniques to serve images in proper dimensions, and incorporates lazy loading. The different methods offered with image optimization help reduce page load time and improve web app performance. Tools like Imagify and Optimizilla work great for this purpose.

5. Code Optimization

Developers should learn to optimize their code to improve its efficiency. It also helps them reduce load times, improve responsiveness, and conserve server resources. Use techniques like removing unnecessary characters, compressing files, lazy and asynchronous loading, and bundling to execute code optimization. One may also leverage AI tools like Workik for this purpose.

6. Monitoring

Use the Google site reliability engineering (SRE) book. It offers a comprehensive framework and methodology for building the web app. It helps technical professionals eliminate performance bottlenecks by focusing on reliability, shift left testing, capacity planning, and incident management.

Real World Stories

Various companies have benefitted from web app optimization. Their revenues have increased significantly since the optimization of their apps. The given mentions are the case studies of some prominent industry names that utilized web app optimization.

1. 30MHz is a hi-tech horticulture company delivering intelligent solutions for its customers. It is based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. It used 13 distinct interventions to improve its performance and expand its business. The process was four months long, and each intervention was designed in a replicable performance engineering plan with their technical outputs.

   
   

   It helped the company significantly reduce time over digital devices while improving performance. It also helped them improve their speed index by 48.25% and 19.85% (on desktop and mobile).

2. Google worked on improving the web search latency by introducing several server-side delays. The research studied different delay types, including pre-header, post-headed, and post-ads, and the results showed that even minor latency of 100-400 ms reduced the daily search by a user by 0.04%.

   
   

   Google used different strategies to address latency issues and improved its server processing efficiency by streamlining code and improving resource allocation. The efforts helped the organization regain its reputation as a tech leader, helped deliver efficient search solutions, and increased daily search volume.

Conclusion

We are living in an age of application tsunami, where even small organizations are utilizing several applications. An app with a clustered layout, complex navigation, and slow loading speed is a BIG NO for many users. An optimized app is scalable, showcasing efficiency, modularity, infrastructure flexibility, and high maintainability.

Find an organization that can help your business grow by improving your web app performance. Remember to check the performance of their website before partnering with them; use the mentioned link to examine the same.