Use JavaScript to visually improve your website?

In this article, you will learn about various techniques that can make your website attractive and fast. This will increase user engagement and make your website more productive.

Let’s first understand JavaScript.

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is one of the web development languages ​​used to add functionality to websites. It makes websites interactive, robust, faster and more beautiful. It is a scripting, interpreted language that compiles directly in a web browser like C or CPP; it does not require a compiler to compile. This is why it is the most popular language in the modern software industry.

In order to develop a website, we need three basic languages ​​HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

• HTML is used to add content to a website, such as images, text, buttons, etc.

• CSS plays an important role in the styling section, which means applying styles to all the content on the website.

• JavaScript is used to make the website interactive, which means making the elements responsive, such that the color of the website changes when you press a button. HTML and CSS just provide the structure of the website, they do not perform any actions on the website, whereas JavaScript performs dynamic activities on the website.

The role of optimization in the website

When developing modern web applications, it is very important to analyze the performance of the website, such as the response speed of the website. Website performance is one of the most important factors in a website's success, as users are more likely to engage with and visit a high-performing website than a low-performing website.

Key points to remember:

• The slower your site is, the lower engagement and traffic will be, and according to reports, low-performing sites have 15% fewer users than high-performing sites.

• A less attractive user interface can also impact engagement. A website that offers an attractive design and fast loading times will attract users and the chances of them returning will increase.

• Excessive Flash content is also bad in terms of appeal. Users mostly like simple designs.

To measure the performance of a website, Google provides the RAIL model -

This model provides the structure of how the website will look and how it will affect the user's attention. Here RAIL stands for responsive, animated, idle, and loaded.

A sign of an unoptimized website is that when the page loads, you may see a white screen for a few seconds and then suddenly the entire page loads. While an optimized website doesn't do anything like this, it does render content in a step-by-step manner where you will see some content appear and then other elements/content will appear.

Let’s understand how performance latency affects user attention from the RAIL model.

• 0 to 16ms - Users don't like the site when a single frame occurs at 16ms.

• 0 to 100ms - Users will be satisfied with performance when their desired results occur within this time frame.

• 100 to 100ms - Within this range, users will experience a slight delay, but it is acceptable.

• 1000ms or more - When times fall within this range (1 second), users lose focus on the task they are performing.

• 10000ms or more - This range of time is when users become frustrated with the site's performance and there is a chance they will not return to the site.

In addition, due to network speed and hardware, there is also a certain delay. As with websites, fast speeds on a powerful machine will be faster than a slow connection on a slow device.

How to improve website performance?

Use the following factors to improve your website's performance, while taking these factors into consideration during the development or maintenance stages of your website.

1. Reduce unused JavaScript code

Writing longer code takes more time to load the web page, so it is important to optimize the code when developing web applications. You can take help of Google Closure Compiler or Uglify JS Code Optimizer which will show you unused functionality, code or features that are no longer used.

Example

Before removing unused code:

function test(){ 
   var p=10, s="stringName";
   console.log("Output here");
   alert("This is sample alert");
   return;
   console.log("This is an unused message");
   for(var i=0;i<10;i++){
      console.log(i);
   }
}
test();

After removing unused code:

function test(){
   console.log("Output here"); 
   alert("This is sample alert") 
} 
test();

Here you can observe that before removing the unused code we are writing the console statement and running a loop after the return statement which is of no use as they will not do anything and we also The variable is not used, so it can be removed as well.

2. Reduce code size

Minification can be done in JavaScript to make the code smaller, it helps reduce the code file size and therefore the loading time of the website.

Example: Breaks, additional spaces, comments, etc. will increase the size of the code file. While the user will have little difficulty reading the code, the computer will have efficient processing speed.

3. Usage of HTTP/2 protocol

The HTTP protocol is designed to perform advanced data communication functions between clients and servers. In 2015, the second major version of the application protocol was developed. The goal of this release is to improve the Internet experience by delivering simplicity, high-speed performance, and robustness.

This protocol improves JavaScript code so that it can handle multiple requests at once, which helps improve website load times.

4. Using JavaScript CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. We link our website with static content to an extended network of services around the world. It stores the content of the website and serves the content to the visitors from the nearest server. Through CDN, files will be automatically compressed and optimized, so that the resource consumption rate becomes low, which is beneficial to improving website speed.

5. Memory leak

A memory leak occurs when a function or application uses memory to complete its execution, but it does not release the memory so other applications may be waiting for the memory. For each new object, you consume memory but don't free it, then JavaScript will think that the program may need the memory. To avoid memory leaks, developers should take this into account and properly manage the scope of their programs.

and do the following:

• Assign null to a global variable and reassign after use.

• Avoid capturing external function variables into closures.

• Handle DOM references with care.

How to improve website visuals for a better user interface?

1. color

When users visit a website, the first thing they notice is its color. When developing a website, a designer chooses a color scheme, which is a set of colors that will be used throughout the interface. When you don’t decide on a color scheme, your website will look very inconsistent, causing users to lose focus and they may leave your site. It also defines the brand identity, taking the tutorialspoint website as an example, you can observe that green and black are included in most of the colors.

2. Compressed file

You may have observed that websites with lots of pages and animations and complex designs take longer to load. To improve website speed and responsiveness, compression methods for large files and images should be considered.

3. Use responsive images

Pictures are an important part of the website. Pictures occupy more than 50% of the website, which may cause the website to slow down. So, to improve speed, use web-type images that are 30% smaller than JPEG or PNG.

4. Group CSS files and selectors

As you know, CSS. It applies effects and is responsible for the visible properties of the website. Creating many stylesheet pages can also lead to slower website performance, so merge all CSS files into one XHTML page and you will notice improved website speed and performance before and after the merge.

5. cache

Caching is a technology for storing subsets of data. It is used to increase data access because it stores a copy of the data requested by the user and returns a cached copy when the user requests it again in the future instead of searching and returning the original file.

There are several types of caching that can help improve content delivery speed.

• Memory Cache - In these types of caches, the cached data is stored in RAM, which increases the speed of the data transfer process within the application.

• Web Caching - There are two terms for this caching technology.

  Web client cache: This type of cache is also called web browser cache. It is stored on the client side. When a web page is loaded into the browser for the first time, it stores the page resources such as text, scripts, images, and other media so that the next time the same page is accessed, the browser does not load them from the server but Load them. View cache stores and retrieve them from client computers.

  Web Server Cache - In this mechanism, our goal is to store resources on the server, not on the client machine. This mechanism helps in dynamically generating data on the website and loading it after some time. This method is not useful in the case of static content, such caching helps reduce overload on the server.

• CDN Caching- CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. This cache stores resources such as web pages, scripts, media files, and style sheets in the proxy server. When a user requests a resource, the proxy server checks whether a copy of the resource is available. If the replica is available, it delivers the resource to the requesting user, otherwise the request is forwarded to the relevant server. This helps reduce network latency if the requesting user is routed to the nearest available server.

• Disc Cache- It is a mechanism similar to memory cache. Disc cache stores data so that it can be accessed faster within applications.

Thus, these technologies will make the website very optimized in terms of visibility and performance.

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