Web applications are an integral component of any and every website, especially, a business website. These web enabled applications streamline a business process and even go onto improves business performance. The best web applications are known for attracting a huge amount of traffic, which is always good news for a website. But, there are times when even the best of applications don’t perform along expected lines. They fall short of what the users expect from them, which can ultimately lead to them being replaced or reengineered.

The problem, in part, lies in development. Enhanced performance is only achieved by making sure that the web application has all the technical attributes to make it perform faster and better.

Here are 5 tips that can help improve the performance of web applications.

1. Caching – A widely used technique
   
   Talk to any developer about improving performance of application and he will direct you to ‘caching’. The premise of this technique is very simple. Caching enables the retention of data or pages for all HTTP requests. This helps the application reuse this data, without having to recreate it or regenerate it.
    
2. Compression of HTTP requests
   
   As the name suggests, the idea behind HTTP compression is to compress HTTP requests and responses from the web server. The main aim of compression is to reduce the pressure on the web server. It’s estimated that the reduction can be as much as 50%. The implementation of HTTP compression can go a long way in increasing performance of the web application.
    
3. Avoid embedding JavaScript
   
   One of the reasons why a web application doesn’t perform optimally is because the JavaScript is embedded in the page, which goes on to increase page size. What happens is that, whenever users visit your website page, they will also have to download the JavaScript. A much better solution is embedding the JavaScript in the JS file. Such files are cached by the user’s web browser.
   
   This has a two-fold benefit – A decreased page size leading to faster load time, which in turn improves web application performance.
    
4. Balance the Load
   
   A case can be made for balancing the request load on two or more servers. If you find that your web server is unable to handle the requests that are pouring in, it will be a good idea to use a load balancer. With the use of a load balancer a request can be redirected to other servers, which will finally serve back to the user.
    
5. Cookie size reduction
   
   Cookies store information about users, which are used to authenticate or personalize their use of the particular application. Keeping the cookie size to a minimum helps optimize the performance of web applications. Also, make sure that your cookies have an expiry date. They should expire as soon as they become redundant for a particular application.

Issues relating to performance enhancement can only be handled by an expert developer. If you think your web application is not performing as well as it should be, you need to get in touch with web application development companies having proven expertise in improving web application performance.

Such companies ensure an improvement in the performance of an existing application or they can design a whole new web application that takes into the consideration the very pointers mentioned above.