Visually improving a website using JavaScript?

In this article, you will get to know about various techniques using which you can make your website attractive and fast. Which will increase user engagement and make your website productive.

Let’s first get to know about JavaScript.

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is one of the web development languages used to add functionality to the website. It makes the website interactive, robust, faster, and prettier. It's a scripting, interpreted language that can be directly compiled in a web browser like C, or CPP; it doesn't need a compiler to compile. This is the reason behind it turning out to be the most popular language in the modern software industry.

To develop a website, we need three basic languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

• HTML is used to add content to the website such as images, text, buttons, and all.

• CSS plays an important role in the styling part means applying the style to all the content present on the website.

• JavaScript is used to make the website interactive means making elements responsive like when you press a button the color of the website will get changed. HTML and CSS just give website structure and they don’t perform anything on the website whereas JavaScript performs a dynamic activity on the website.

Role of Optimization in a Website

When developing a modern web application, it’s very crucial to analyze the performance of the website, such as how fast the website will respond. The performance of your website is one of the most important factors in the success of your website, as users are more likely to get engaged and visit a high-performing website than a low-performing one.

Points to remember:

• The lower your website speed the lower engagement and traffic will be and as per the report, low-performance websites get 15% fewer users than high−performing sites.

• A less attractive user interface also impacts engagement. A website offering an attractive design coupled with a fast-loading time will attract users, and the chance for the user to return will increase.

• In terms of attractiveness having too much flash content is also not good. Users mostly like minimalistic design.

To measure the performance of the website, Google provided the RAIL model −

The model provides the structure of how the website will look and how it will impact the user's focus. Here RAIL stands for Response, Animation, Idle, Load.

The sign of an unoptimized website is when the page is loading, you may see a white screen for a few seconds, and then suddenly the entire page will load. While an optimized site will not do such action instead it will present content in a step-by-step manner, and you will see some content has appeared, and after that other elements/content will get displayed.

Let’s see from the RAIL model how performance delay impacts user focus.

• 0 to 16ms − The user doesn’t like the website when the time taken by a single frame to appear is 16ms.

• 0 to 100ms − When the expected result by the user appears within this time range then they feel satisfied with the performance.

• 100 to 100ms − In this range, users feel a slight delay but that is acceptable.

• 1000ms or more − when the time falls in this range (1 sec) then the user loses focus on the task they are performing.

• 10000ms or more − This range time is when the user feels frustrated by the website’s performance, and there is a chance they will not come back to this site.

Moreover, there is also some delay due to network speed and hardware. Like the website, speed is fast on a powerful machine with more speed as compared to low connection speed on a slow device.

How to Improve the Performance of a Website?

Using the Following factors, the performance of the website can be increased while taking it into the consideration while the development or maintenance phase of a website.

1. Reduce unused JavaScript code

Writing longer lengths of code takes more time to load the webpage so it is very crucial to optimize the code while the development of your web application. You can take the help of "Google closure compiler" or Uglify JS code optimizer which will show you the unused functionality, code, or feature which is no longer being 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 the 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 any operation and we are also not using the variables so that can also be removed.

2. Minify the Code Size

Minification can be done in JavaScript in terms of making code smaller, it helps in reducing the code file size which decreases the load times of the website.

Example: break, additional spaces, comments, etc. increases the size of the code file. Though it will make little difficult for the user to read the code, the computer will have an efficient speed to processing.

3. Use of HTTP/2 Protocol

The HTTP protocol is designed to perform high-level data communication functions between the client and server. In 2015 the second major version of the application protocol was developed. The goal of this version is to improve the internet experience by providing simplicity, high-speed performance, and robustness.

This protocol improves the JavaScript code, and it can handle multiple requests at a time which helps in enhancing the loading time of the website.

4. Use of JavaScript CDN

CDN stands for content delivery network. We link our website to static content to an extended network of services across the globe. it stores the content of the website and provides the content from the nearest server present to the visitor. By use of CDN, the files become automatically compressed and optimized and, in this way, the resource consumption rate becomes low which helps in making the website speed fast.

5. Memory leak

A memory leak occurs when a function or application has done its execution by using memory, but it doesn’t free the memory so other applications might be waiting for the memory. For every new object, you consume memory but don’t free the memory then JavaScript thinks that the program may need the memory. To avoid memory leaks developers should take it into consideration and properly manage the scope of the program.

And do the following things like:

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

• Avoid trapping the outer function variables into the closure.

• Handling DOM references carefully.

How to Improve Website Visuality for Better UI?

1. Colors

When a user visits a website the first thing getting noticed is its color. While developing a website designer chooses a color scheme which is a set of colors that will be used throughout the interface. When you don’t decide on the color scheme it makes your website look very inconsistent which leads to losing the focus of the user and they may leave your website. It also defines the brand identity Take an example of tutorialspoint website where you can observe mostly green and black is included in the majority of color.

2. Compress the files

You may have observed that a website that contains lots of pages, and animations, and contains a complex design takes longer time to load. To improve the site speed and responsiveness one should consider the compression method for the large files and images.

3. Using responsive image

The images are an important part of a website which take more than 50% of the website which can make the website speed slow. So, to make the speed efficient use web-type images which are 30% smaller in terms of JPEG or PNG.

4. Grouping CSS files and Selectors

As you are aware the CSS. It applies the effect and is responsible for the visible property of the website. Creating many stylesheet pages can also reason for the lower performance of the website so one can combine all the CSS files into one XHTML page, and you will notice the speed and performance of the website before and after the merging.

5. Caching

Caching is a technique for storing a subset of the data. It is used to increase data access as it stores the copy of the data that the user has requested and when in the future user will request again then return the cache copy instead of searching and returning the original file.

Many types of caching are there which can help improve the content delivery speed.

• In memory caching − In these kinds of caching cached data are stored into the ram which increases the speed of the data delivery process within an application.

• Web caching − There are two terms in this caching technique.

  Web client caching: This kind of caching is also known as web browser caching. It is stored on the client side. When the first time a web page gets loaded into the browser then it stores the page resource like text, script, images, and other media so that the next time you visit the same page the browser will not load them from the server instead it will look into the cache storage and retrieve them from the client machine.

  Web server caching − In this mechanism instead of the client computer, we aim to store the resources on the server. This mechanism is helpful in dynamically generating data on the website, which gets loaded after some time. This method is not useful in the case of static content, these kinds of caching help reducing the overload on the server.

• CDN caching − CDN stands for content delivery network. This kind of caching stores the resources like web pages, scripts, media files, and stylesheets in the proxy server. When the user requests the resources then a proxy server checks if the copy of the same is available or not. If the copy is available, then it delivers the resource to the requested user otherwise the request will get forwarded to the concerned server. In case the requesting user gets routed to the nearest available server which helps in the reduction of the network latency.

• Disc caching − It is type of mechanism like memory caching. disc caching stores the data so that it can be accessed faster within an application.

So, these was some of the technique which will make a website very optimized in terms of visibility and performance.