You’ll often find many resources dedicated to speeding up public websites on the Internet. But what about web applications in your company?
I sat down at my cubicle at my day job and loaded our standard enterprise login page that almost every app in our organization uses. I waited about 10 seconds before the page loaded. I wondered why it took so long to load.
I noticed the company logo image in the top left corner of the page. I got curious and checked the disk size of the image. It was 66kb in size. I downloaded it to my computer, and using squoosh.app I was able to compress the image down to 34kb. That’s almost half the size!
Imagine if my organization compressed all images in all of our web apps. The time it takes for employees to load web apps would be massively reduced. Server load and drive space usage would be reduced as well, saving resources and more importantly, money!
This is just a simple example. Many of the apps I looked at in my organization didn’t have any of the multiple other technologies available for increasing the speed of their apps. Many of them could have gzip compression enabled, use LightSpeed server caching, or even leverage browser caching.
If organizations like mine treated all of their web apps like a webmaster treats their public Internet websites, the time and cost savings across the entire organization could be absolutely massive!
The prospect got me excited and I proposed a project to my manager where we evaluate our web apps for optimization. Hopefully I’ll get to work on it. I’ll update this post with what happens next in the future.