Rules to Better Application Performance

Performance, load and stress testing should be tackled after you have confirmed that everything works functionally (usually after UX testing). Performance testing should only be after daily errors are down to zero (reported by Application Insights or Raygun). This way you can be sure that any functional issues that occur during performance tests are scaling issues.

Optimizing bundle size improves website performance, reduces load times, and enhances user experience. Large bundles slow rendering, increase memory usage, and hurt SEO. By minimizing dependencies, using tree shaking, code splitting, and dynamic imports, developers ensure only necessary code loads. This leads to faster interactions, lower bandwidth use, and better mobile performance, making optimization essential for a smooth web experience.

Nobody Likes a Slow Website. You should optimize the performance of your websites so it loads as quick as possible.

Before merging any Pull Request (PR) that might affect your application's behavior or performance, you should run comparison tests between the production environment and the PR deployment slot to identify potential issues.

When starting on the path of improving application performance, it is always important to know when you can stop. The goal posts would depend on the type of application being written and the number of active users of the application and the budget. Some examples of performance goals are:

In every successful team or project, it is crucial to track meaningful progress rather than relying solely on gut feelings. Clear metrics transform vague opinions into data-driven insights. This approach leads to better decisions, more objective performance reviews, and continuous improvement over time.

When a client raises concerns about performance, it is important not to immediately dive into the code to make blind fixes. Instead of guessing what might help, we should approach the issue methodically by starting with clear benchmarks, profiling, and data-driven decisions.

The following steps will help to guide efforts to implement a performance improvement. The key is to only make a small change with each iteration and run a performance test to ensure that change resulted in an improvement.

Lighthouse is an open-source tool built into Google Chrome that can audit for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more. Allowing you to improve the quality of web pages.

For modern applications, there are many layers and moving parts that need to seamlessly work together to deliver our application to the end user.

Once you have set up your Application Insights as per the rule 'Do you know how to set up Application Insights' and you have your daily failed requests down to zero, you can start looking for performance problems. You will discover that uncovering your performance related problems are relatively straightforward.