The importance of application performance is critical to the business and the users it serves. In this article, I identify some of the key factors and benefits of good application performance.

What is Performance

Performance is how fast your application renders and how effectively it responds to the user’s interactions.

Providing smooth and quick user interactions or feedback regarding the application’s activities and processes is crucial to good performance.

Why Performance

A great user experience depends on the performance of your application. Most visitors are unaware of a good application’s performance, but they often notice a bad one.

Performance can vary for the user’s device and the internet connection speed. A user accessing the application on a desktop with a fiber optic internet connection will have a fast download and a smoother user experience. While a user on a mobile device with a 3G connection accessing the same application may have a slow download and a terrible user experience.

Performance Factors

Before we identify why performance is important here are a few factors that affect performance.

Application Size : The size of your rendered application can affect its performance, from the paragraph above, we mentioned two possible scenarios where users could access your application. The size can greatly affect the time it takes to render depending on the speed and the user’s device.

Interactive response : User interaction with your application if not handled well can affect the application’s performance.

Responsive Content : Rendered content if not well arranged can not only affect the performance but also push some content out of the screen’s viewport.

Performance Benefit

Now that we have identified some of the things that can affect an application’s performance let’s dive into why performance consideration is important.

It enforces Accessibility

Accessibility or accessible application is an application that can be accessible to keyboard, mouse, and touch screen users, and any other way users access the web, including screen readers and voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home.

MDN webdocs.

Considering performance for your application can enforce building with accessibility in mind. As you build to provide based on a user’s device it equally enforces you to implement features that are specific for the device while making the application responsive.

Improve conversion rates

Every application is built to provide paid or free services or products. A conversion rate is a rate at which site visitors perform a measured or desired action.

The application’s load time is a major factor for conversion rate and is easy to notice by users. Google identified in its research papers that 90% of users will navigate away from a site if takes more than 5 seconds to load. Learn more here

Great User Experience

Performance is all about user experience, making sure every component works as expected and is easy to use without unforeseen blockers.

Key statistics for implementing great user experience — StartupBonsai.

• 88% of consumers are less likely to return to a site with a bad User Experience and more likely to tell their friends about it.
• 75% of consumers judge a site’s credibility based on how it looks.
• 32% of users will leave a brand they love if they have one bad experience.
• 45% of users expect content to display correctly across different devices.

Conclusion

Great performance is not all about beautiful designs with lots of content, it is about considering the user and providing a comfortable experience for the application’s result.

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