Push Your Products Right With The Complete Front-End Performance Testing Guide

The most vital job of any business before sliding their product into the market is to ensure if all is working as expected as per the end user’s standpoint. One of the major aspects of this assurance is to be well aware of the Complete Front-End Performance Testing Guide. Whilst in any development procedure, front-end, and back-end operations go hand-in-hand, 80% of the retention rate of potential users is hooked by the look and feel of the product itself. With the growing competition among millions of websites onboard, organizations are moving towards having dedicating teams for these assurance purposes. Let us now take you on the route for a complete guide that will make your jobs much easier to have a flawless customer experience. 

Why Try Complete Front-End Performance Testing Guide? 

Front-End testing is all about the end user’s perspective in visiting your website or application and how well the interactivity happens there. From the page load time to image loading, everything makes a signifying impact in converting a visitor into a potential customer. Neglecting such measures while delivering a product into the marketplace can cause serious damages to the brand name’s credibility as well as the user retention rates. 

Complete Front-End Performance Testing Guide in Details

There are many different dimensions and measures that QAs (Quality Analysts) need to look for while performing the front-end testing procedures. Leaving out on any single critical aspect can get the brand’s loyalty and credibility at the stake in otherwise cases. 

Validating Application Rendering Across Various Devices

While designing any website or application, it is of utmost importance to consider the end user’s motto in mind. Your website’s/application’s theme should match with the services or products that you deliver. Also not to miss the point that the rendering should be coherent across all browsers in different devices, either it is a Windows machine, a Mac system, or a mobile phone. As per the variation of user usability across different platforms, businesses must ensure flawless interactive sessions for their end customers. 

Cut out on the Loading Time

Websites are cluttered with a lot of JS files and images for providing the users with every possible information they might need while visiting your portal. But having a lot of external links and high-quality images can hamper your website’s performance in terms of page loading times. There are many front-end performance testing tools available for reducing the image size without compromising on the quality aspects to have a better performance in terms of latency. 

Minimize User Input Delays

For making the user experience obstacle-free without any hindrance issues, QAs performing the front-end testing must ensure that the click-through rates on the websites do not take longer durations in sending back the response. Studies have shown that the average time that a user is most likely to spend and wait after clicking a button or link on any web page is not more than 4-5 seconds. Such delays leave an impression of a poor performance picture in the user’s eyes which ultimately results in lowering the page rankings. 

How to Achieve Front-End Performance Optimization?

Having a fully optimized application can do wonders for a satisfactory end-user experience and high success rates. However, one needs to have consideration for all the below-mentioned aspects (and many more) to have a high-end-performing website. Some major critical areas of consideration are:

1. StyleSheets Optimization

Having a substantial amount of CSS (cascading style sheets) files can increase the load time while rendering a web page. Out of many ways for CSS optimization, one very common practice that the QAs follow is to replace @import with <link> tags. This allows multiple CSS files to render parallelly without hampering the loading time performance of web pages. 

2. Image Optimization

People love to set their eyes on high-quality HD images while looking for any product or information. However, incorporating such HD quality images in your web pages can lead to a high load time which is something that is not acceptable on the end user’s part. To rectify this issue, try not to include any irrelevant information in the images such as camera specs, date, or time details. Moreover, there are many free tools available in the market that allows you to optimize images without compromising on the quality aspects. 

Few examples of such tools are:

1. Optimizilla
2. Kraken.io
3. Optimus
4. JPEG Optimizer
5. Trimage
6. CompressNow

Follow the Preloading Techniques

A very common and proactive technique followed these days is pre-fetching. This deals with the rendering of all the content, files, and images beforehand a web page loads. Rendering everything that is required to make your web page load in no time before even the user clicks on it is something that is boosting up web pages efficiency exponentially. 

Different types of Prefetching mechanisms available:

1. Prerendering
2. Link Prefetching
3. DNS Prefetching

Execute Performance Metrics

To have a fulfilled desired experience of an optimized web page, QA specialists follow a set of defined metrics that are essential for the overall performance of any website or application. Few of the many defined standard metrics are as follows:

1. Page Speed Index

Set a defined measure to load everything that is required (across various devices and networks) when the user first visits your web page. The other information can always run in the background till the user is hooked with what is being displayed to him/her. 

2. User Interactivity Time

This is the area where the end users cannot be tricked into as the interactivity controls displayed to them on the web page must act and send responses in quick manners to maintain the user’s engagement. It should not happen that the button or control the user is trying to access is still getting loaded in the background process making the user feel that the web page has become non-responsive. 

3. First Contentful Paint

It is the first content that the user will be seeing while visiting your web page. Although the content displayed during this step will be raw without any fonts or styling, it’s something that cannot be neglected from the performance point of view. 

Conclusion

By looking at every measure of the complete front-end performance testing guide, it is quite clear that one cannot simply rely on the back-end and server-side testing mechanisms to achieve a smooth end delivery of the website or application. Performing client-side (front-end) testing procedures are of equal importance and even more so for a high engagement rate when it comes to the retention of potential visitors on a web page. Having a team of skilled and professional QAs enables organizations to achieve such rates of success without hampering any other ongoing processes.

Also Read: Skills A Front End Developer Should Have