Web application development has become a requisite need for cross-industry enterprises to sustain the cut-throat market competition. A web application enables organizations to enhance their online presence and strengthen brand identity to gain a competitive edge. Besides, it is the first step towards a digital transformation that is conducive to achieving comprehensive business growth. However, developing a web application would not suffice unless you have an effective business strategy in place for website maintenance.
Web application maintenance is a crucial aspect of the marketing strategy as it directly impacts the user experience and usability. It is, therefore, essential to continuously analyze and optimize a website or web app in accordance with universally accepted quality standards. In this blog post, we delineate crucial steps to ensure effective web application maintenance in 2022 and beyond.
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Essential Steps To Web Application Maintenance
Web application maintenance requires a proactive approach to continuously analyze the application, detect anomalies, potential loopholes, and take steps to fix them. Below are the essential steps that must be part of your application maintenance and management strategy.
Bug Fixing
When you embark on the web application development journey, you would definitely encounter a number of bugs along the way. It is perfectly normal to discover bugs in web apps that may hinder the app’s performance, resulting in a bad user experience. It is, therefore, essential to conduct a variety of usability and accessibility tests to detect bugs that went unnoticed during the development phase. Subsequently, developers should take essential steps to fix them before they push the code to the production environment. Once the application is live, we must perform rigorous bug fixing before every new update or build deployment.
Security Updates
If you have opted for a vendor-based (off-the-shelf) web solution, it is most likely to fetch automatic security updates. However, custom web application development may require manual updates for essential security upgrades. These updates contain important security features, bug fixes, and software changes that are likely to improve performance and maintain stability within the application architecture. With a custom web application, it is critical to ensure that you have dedicated resources to take care of all crucial system updates.
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API Updates
Application programming interfaces (APIs) have made things fairly simple for web developers as it saves them from hours of strenuous effort. At the same time, it significantly reduces development costs since you do not have to build custom functionalities. With third-party APIs, you can easily achieve complex functionalities while also delivering great user experiences. However, many third-party service providers keep changing their APIs and at some point, the older APIs might not work at all. In such cases, developers must update your app with the latest third-party APIs to get rid of the temporary disruption. Updating these APIs typically requires 8-12 hours of coding and after which they should be up and running again.
App Scaling
Scaling issues are quite common with web applications that may arise due to fluctuations in the userbase or changes in marketing strategies. For seamless web application management, it is crucial to address these issues on time. That said, a majority of cloud-based web applications can automatically scale in accordance with trivial business changes. However, when the changes become more significant, you have to manually scale up or down until you have an ideal software architecture. Scaling a web application may require database changes, hardware upgrades, or migrating to a different tech stack.
Performance Monitoring
Despite the best effort, you may encounter bugs at any point in your web application that is up and running. Similarly, third-party APIs may require an update without any prior notification. Failure to fix these issues or running system updates will directly impact your website performance and may cause unwanted disruptions. It is, therefore, essential that you pay umpteen attention to the web application while continuously monitoring its performance across devices. It is advisable to conduct routine system checkups and quality tests, and troubleshoot software issues as they arise.
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Wrapping Up
These were the most important steps to ensure seamless website performance across all supported platforms. Of course, there is more to web application maintenance but the aforementioned practices must be on top of the checklist. Most importantly, you must keep monitoring the website performance with a focus on crucial parameters like load time (including FCP/LCP), bounce rate, quality backlinks, URL health, and the likes. You can simply use free tools like GTMetrix, SEMRush, and Google PageSpeed Insights to check your website performance. Accordingly, you can ask developers to optimize the website code in order to fix the issues that were detected.
How We Help You With Web Application Development and Maintenance?
We are a service-based company that enables enterprises to build custom software solutions for web, mobile, and other platforms. Our development team specializes in building and publishing multi-tenant SaaS applications to address the diverse needs of our customers. We specialize in web application development and maintenance with a focus on delivering engaging user experiences across devices. Our team includes experienced UI/UX experts, frontend/backend developers, and skilled QA engineers to build high-quality web applications. We also provide on-demand web application maintenance services to ensure that your app performs seamlessly across the supported platforms with minimal downtime. For more information, you may reach us out at [email protected].
