Companies now not only have to go fully digital but need to ensure the high availability and performance of their web applications. We need to ensure that our web application performance is super user-friendly and hops smoothly. As there is a saying, “Face is the index of our Mind”, I do have a similar saying for digital environment of your company, “Website represents the face of the Company”.
There are many challenges that companies face while developing their websites or web applications and scaling up of web applications and its operations. As per our experience, the most common issues are slow servers, bulky image sizes in web pages, poorly written codes, etc. Below are the most common problems in web application performance and a brief explanation on how to fix them.
1. Slow servers
You may have faced issue of slow loading of your website. Well one of the reason may be, your website is hosted in a shared server. Shared server will be sharing its resources with hundreds or possibly thousands of other websites.
If you do not have budget constraints and if you actually need a performing website, we suggest you to move your website to a dedicated server, which comes with an additional cost.
2. No load balancers
Another possible reason for slow loading of your website can be due to lack of load balancers or poorly configured load balancers. When lot of visitor visits your website and assuming that you or your hosting provider do not have load balancers installed and configured, then visitors will see the slow loading time and at the backend more visits to your website will drown out your servers even if the system is under capacity.
There are few tools out in the market and the suggestion is to use NeoLoad which helps you to find your infrastructure weakness so that you can troubleshoot the issues. Other suggestion is to create cluster of servers instead of a single server which take all the load of your website.
3. DNS related issues
Domain Name System, translates human readable domain names to machine readable IP address which is a basic element of successful web traffic management. With faulty DNS configurations and without proper DNS queries, your users may not be able to visit your websites causing errors (especially 404 error).
DNS issues can be traced and eliminated by implementing DNS monitoring tools. We will write an another article covering the best DNS server monitoring tools. Until then stay tuned!
4. Not optimizing the Bandwidth usage
While you develop and test your website or web application, you often rely in local resources (like server available on your premise with low capacity and local network environment) This is not an issue but under estimating bandwidth for your website if it contains audio and/or video or other high volume data may affect performance of your website once it’s deployed to production server, especially for the visitors accessing the website or web application through their smartphones.
To overcome the issues, make sure you have optimized your bandwidth usage for optimal performance. Bandwidth optimization can also be achieved by minimizing usage of JavaScript and CSS files, enabling server side HTTP compression and optimization of images.
5. Traffic spikes
If you own a website or developing a website for your customer, you will often see spikes in the website load, especially during media promotions via your website (using videos to showcase your products or skills) and your server cannot handle extra traffic more than the budgeted traffic. This can also slow down servers and may bring down your website completely harming your brand.
The way to avoid traffic spikes is by setting up an early warning system such as Nagios or NeoSense which will help you forecast traffic spike and add more bandwidth your servers.
6. HTML title tags
The name of your website will affect its performance as HTML title tags are essential to get indexed in search engines. Important factor is, a lack of specificity in your domain name can lower your website visibility in internet. This is due to the fact that sometimes site owners use the same title throughout their website, which causes search engines to look for duplicate title tags and pares them, causing sites to lose traffic.
This issue can be overcome by doing a name search as “site:yourdomain.com.” to analyse your website. Google will offer more information on HTML errors such as missing title tags, missing descriptions and more useful information.
These 6 types of issues plague many of the web application/web sites we have reviewed. By examining each of these further and fixing where possible would instantly give your tremendous boost. Now wait and watch for more of your website users to stick around !