There’s one thing that stops single-page applications from dominating all other kinds of applications. They can take forever to launch. This is a huge problem as even one second of delay can cost you 7% of conversions.

But just like you can make your single-page app SEO-friendly, you can improve its performance.

Here is a basic guide for those who want to speed up their SPAs as well as for those who only consider turning their business idea into a single-page app.

How to discover if your SPA needs a performance boost?

There are a lot of tools that help you monitor SPA performance. First, you can use the Chrome Devtools extensions such as Ember Inspector or React Performance Devtools. But they don’t reflect the perceived loading speed of your SPA.

Here’s the thing: often it doesn’t matter how fast your app really is as long as users think it loads fast.

There is a whole other subset of tools like Speed Index from WebPageTest that try to match the actual user experience. But real users come from a wide range of devices/networks and it’s hard to account for all of them in a synthetic testing environment.

We advise you to enter the Real User Monitoring (RUM). Unlike simulated RUM passively tracks every interaction that people have with your application. It can give you an accurate real-time picture of how users perceive loading speed.

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