How To Improve The Speed Of Your App

As an app developer, it is crucial to prioritise the optimisation of your app’s speed to ensure its optimal efficiency. With the ever-increasing size and complexity of apps today, finding ways to make them run faster can ensure that users get the best performance from your product. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of app speed and methods to optimise your app’s performance for quicker operation.

Why is App Speed Important?

App speed is crucial in today’s fast-paced digital environment as it directly impacts user experience, engagement, and retention. A slow-loading app can lead to frustration, impatience, and, ultimately, users abandoning the app in favour of a more efficient alternative. In an era where attention spans are dwindling and competition is fierce, app developers must prioritise speed optimisation to ensure seamless navigation and quick response times. By investing in app speed improvements, businesses can enhance customer satisfaction and boost their brand reputation, increase conversion rates, and foster long-term loyalty among their user base. In simple terms, the speed of an app is a crucial aspect of any application.

How to Make the Speed of Your App Quicker

Now that we know why app speed is important, below are some useful tips on how to make your application speed faster:

Database indexing – If the database an app depends on is inefficient, even optimised code will result in slow performance. To improve app speed, focus on optimising the database. Enabling database indexing is a simple and effective trick for improving database speed. A well-executed database index configuration can significantly boost app performance, especially for those with high transaction volumes.

Lazy image loading – Images have become an essential part of most apps today. However, it can be challenging to load them quickly, especially for web-based apps that rely on downloading images from remote servers. A useful solution to make apps run faster is to adopt “lazy” image loading, where images are loaded after the rest of the app’s content has been downloaded.

Container – You might want to contemplate shifting your server-side apps from virtual machines to containers to enhance performance. When comparing VMs (virtual machines) to containers, it’s clear that containers are more resource efficient because deploying, running, and managing containers requires less IT resources. This is because their images are measured in megabytes rather than gigabytes. Adapting a virtual machine app into a container may be time-consuming, but some tools can streamline the process.

Fake content – A significant hurdle in achieving fast content display is the speed of internet data transfer. People nowadays have little patience for content that takes too long to load. It is crucial to ensure that even heavy content loads quickly to maintain their interest. A blank page with a loading bar or wheel is often insufficient, leaving users uncertain about when the content will load and what to expect. To address this issue and enhance user experience, incorporating fake content like blocks and grey lines in place of photos and text can provide visual cues while waiting. While this does not necessarily speed up the time it takes to load a page, it creates the illusion of faster loading for the user.

Contact Appoly for App Development

If you are looking to develop a web or mobile app or have an idea that you’d like to discuss, then get in touch and speak to one of our expert UK-based development team members.

We’re always happy to discuss new projects, whether big or small.

You can get in touch via 01926 520 052, email, or using the contact form on our contact page.