Tips for Optimizing Mobile App Loading Times

Intro

Unoptimized SSL & TLS guidelines can increase the app loading time and slow the mobile app's performance.

App loading time is a crucial factor affecting any application's popularity. Users often avoid applications with more loading times.

Google says that if your mobile app is taking 3 or more seconds to load, the bounce rate of users becomes 32% higher as compared to speedy loading apps. And somehow, if the app takes around 10 seconds to load, the bounce rate reaches up to 123%.

As recent smartphones have modern hardware capabilities, developers are free to integrate better functionalities and UI. But, by integrating modern features, their loading time may increase, which shouldn’t happen.

Here, we will mainly focus on tips for optimizing the mobile app loading time. Let’s dive in and understand more.

Why is it important to optimise App Load Time?

App loading time is directly related to the UX. More application load time means a decrease in user satisfaction.

The app’s success depends on its performance. Optimizing the app load time means ultimately optimising its performance.

Statistically saying, the ideal app load time should be 2 seconds. Users tend to abandon websites/apps that take more than 3 secs to load. Still, load time may be acceptable up to 5-7 seconds, but it turns down the user experience of that system.

If your system is taking more than 10 seconds to load, it means there's a risk of losing the majority of your users and very few chances of visitors converting into regular users.

Here are a few reasons why reducing load time and increasing the app’s speed is necessary:

• It keeps the users engaged and hooked to use the application for a longer time
• Affects and improves the overall working of the app
• Increases the user experience and enhances traffic
• Minimises churn rate, app abandonments, and bounce rates
• Increases the engagement rate, traffic, and revenue
• Improves your brand image, app quality, and its values.

Now, let’s see effective ways to optimize the mobile app loading time.

Effective Tips for Optimising Mobile App Loading Time

First comes the:

Visual Content Optimization

In the process of app development, one truth stands tall- visual optimization. Optimizing images to different multimedia elements needs an important chunk of digital estate.

You can verify if each visual content on your site such as images, animations, infographics, video, etc. has correct formats like GIF, JPEG, and PNG. After that, you can group them to diminish the content size.

Also, ensure that the image is not too big. The prescribed size of a picture should be under 100kb to balance the ideal page load speed.

Minimize the number of animation objects

Cutting down irrelevant animation will generate a positive impact on the app’s performance. But, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t add animated transitions at all. Using animation is one of the key tricks that UI experts implement for more engagement with users. However, more than the required animation will make your site look unpleasant.

An experienced front-end developer or UI designer knows how much animation is necessary to have in a website. Major stuffing of animation will reduce the app’s speed, and increase its loading time.

Use of Light Code

Developers should remove all the unnecessary code from the app’s codebase. Ensure that you use compact JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files to easily optimize the code during the runtime.

The code should look clean, and understandable and should be loaded before the page is displayed on the devices. Bulky and messy code will slow down the mobile app’s speed.

Verify the plugins

To ensure that the app is top-edge and best-in-class performance, developers have to integrate different plug-ins for different functions. However, these plug-ins may have a bug or error that is overlooked.

So, developers should perform a quick check of each plug-in before integrating them into the app. Also, timely examination of existing plug-ins and third-party libraries is necessary. If they show errors or bugs, remove them.

Deactivating such tools and outdated libraries can be more useful in the application’s functioning. You can also use different tools like ‘Gzip’ for seamless processes.

Release Timely App Updates

If your application is updated regularly, the chances of its performance degradation are minimized. This practice helps with faster app speed and improved app performance.

As a developer, you should ensure that your app is compatible with modern platforms on which it has to run seamlessly.

Outdated and older platform versions can cause major problems in the future. Moreover, obsolete versions have minimal safety from the latest and risky security threats.

So, one of the key solutions to this situation is to develop or update the app to its latest version. And also keep the end-users aware of the releases and updates. Notify them about the updates, and help them to update to the latest app version whenever necessary.

Check and Cut down Overcrowded Data

An app gathers and stores a lot of information in it. However, if the data collection isn’t managed easily, it can affect the application speed. Different elements of the mobile app occupy different amounts of space in the app.

The only way to solve this trouble is by compressing the data that an app receives. This information includes images, HTML tags, app code, and other things.

These data are usually transferred in an uncompressed way, hence, you have to compress them. Once this data is compressed, it will not interrupt the mobile app’s loading time and performance.

Minimize the Number of Analytics and Ads

With the in-app ads, you can rope the analytics and traffic, and help you get quantifiable information. While both analytics and ads are vital, speed optimization is becoming necessary.

Multiple irrelevant ads and analytical plugins can highly influence the app load time and its performance. Hence, choose your app content accurately, and verify its effect on the traffic and app performance.

Use CDN- Content Delivery Network

Mobile apps with strong traffic and high app load time should use Content Delivery Network. It’s a system of distributed servers that makes web pages quite accessible from different geographical locations.

It unites the targeted traffic that is dispersed & reduces the bandwidth load making the app load time faster. Some CDN service providers are- AWS CloudFront, Edgecast, Fastly, and Cloudflare.

Choose the right server and caching

A server’s job is to give an environment for the apps to function and run. It acts as a bridge between the back end and the user.

Hence, you and the application provider must use a persistent server with a strong CPU, and multiple storage capacities. Caching of the content is also essential as it minimizes the server load. It also increases the app speed by storing data that can be accessed anytime.

Concluding Words

In the end, we hope that this piece of content has given you brief information about optimizing the mobile app’s loading time. Loading time ultimately is related to the performance of your mobile app and its speed. As we saw above, it is essential to minimize the loading time and increase the speed of your app.

These tips and tricks will help you in improving your app speed. However, just following these steps will not end your task. You will have to connect with a reliable mobile app development company to help you build an optimized app.

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