TOP 5 MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT TRENDS FOR 2022

With the advancement of technology, the mobile app development industry has become one of the fastest-growing markets in the past decade. In recent years, mobile app usage has increased significantly.

Some of the stats about mobile usage for your reference

1. According to Statista, there were over 6.4 billion smartphone users.
2. According to DataReportal, 69.4% of mobile users use online shopping apps.
3. According to Statista, mobile web traffic had a 54.9% traffic share of the total global web traffic.
4. Mobile users account for over 70% of Youtube traffic.
5. According to Statista, there will be around 931 million mobile users in India in 2022, and by 2040 mobile users will cross the 1.5 billion+ mark.
6. Currently approx. 10 billion mobile devices are in use worldwide.

Whether it’s mobile technology, mobile ecosystem, competition among brands, or the Covid 19, people have become inclined to use mobile devices and apps for most of their daily chores.

Mobile usage and hence the mobile apps are only here to increase. This blog would cover, what we think, would be the Top 5 trends that the Mobile App Development community will focus on in 2022. Let’s get started.

1. 5G:

5G is the wireless technology’s 5th Generation which rolled out in 2019, but it gained popularity in the last year as many governments started implementing 5G infrastructure for their respective countries. We believe 5G would be a game-changer and here are a few reasons why we think it is so important

Impact of 5G in Mobile App Development:

1. It will immensely enhance the speed and performance of the video apps by providing high-resolution Ultra HD live streaming for a fascinating user experience.
2. It will integrate the technologies in the apps very smoothly and seamlessly.
3. It will help large ventures to share their large amounts of data hassle-free.
4. Developers can enhance UX and boost app functionalities with the help of 5G’s superior connectivity and decreased loading time.

2. AR/ VR:

Augmented Reality is another mobile development domain that has been hot for a couple of years. We still believe it has not yet reached its full potential, and hence we are listing it as a top trend for the year 2022. AR is an enhanced version of the real world and it helps people to enclose the digital content over the real-time environment around the user. It provides users with an interactive experience in 3D by generating live images and sounds in the real world. 

Example:

In the past couple of years, users have downloaded ‘Pokemon Go’ and made it one of the most lovable AR-based games. It used AR technology to give a unique experience to the users by combining the digital world and the real world. The players can watch their beloved pokemon either in their homes or on the streets. People of every age group are still fascinated by this game.

Virtual Reality creates a virtual environment for the user like the real world in which objects and images seem to be real. It brings the virtual world and the real world together. It uses headsets for creating virtual images in the real world to give the users an intriguing experience of playing the games or visualize the virtual environment as the first person.

Example:

Metaverse, as introduced by Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect example for Virtual Reality. Concepts/ideas are already making a buzz for Walmart and H&M that shows users shopping in the Metaverse 

Using both AR and VR businesses can increase their customer base by displaying their products and services in very engaging ways.

Impact of AR/ VR in Mobile App Development:

1. AR would help stores to display inventory/stock that is physically not available hence capturing potential buyers.
2. It can also help the customers to save their time by using virtual fitting rooms.
3. The real estate industry could be using AR/VR to provide customers with a 3D tour of their properties.
4. Businesses can use VR-enabled apps for displaying intrinsic images and information for the users with the help of stable tracking of the user’s movements.

3. AI and Machine Learning:

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most preferred app development areas for businesses. The competition between companies in providing a better customer experience in their apps has taken AI/ML to the next level. Apps are now focusing on decision-making and problem-solving features which use Machine Learning algorithms that copy human capabilities.

The most commonly used AI feature is face recognition which helps users with an extra layer of security to their devices. AI/ML also helps in detecting frauds, information breaches, and suspicious activities that eventually help businesses to minimize their losses.

Example

At CES 2022, Engineered Arts demonstrated its humanoid Ameca. It is a robot with human-like facial expressions. It’s one of the best examples of how AI/ML is advancing.

As Elon Musk says “Robots will be able to do everything better than us.”, we do agree with this statement and we believe that AI/ML is here to stay. Who knows Terminator: Rise of Machine might be a reality in the future 🙂 

The following statistics do support the above claims at some level

• According to Business Standards, in 2022, global AI software revenue can reach around $62.5 billion.
• According to Statista, by 2025, the market revenue of face recognition is expected to reach the $8 billion mark.
• By 2030, the global AI chip market is expected to reach $194.9 billion.

Impact of AI and ML in Mobile App Development:

1. AI could provide a real-time translation to the users even with no internet connection.
2. ML could be used on large scales with banking applications. It’s already being used by a few giants like BNY Mello and Wells Fargo (Machine Learning for finances), we anticipate that this will be explored at greater depths.
3. There are high possibilities of AI helping software developers generate basic code blocks which could be used as the foundation for their work and hence reduce the overall development time.
4. The shopping experience for a customer is going to get improved and personalized, hence mobile-commerce would be pushed to use ML in a way that does not invade customers’ privacy.

4. IoT:

Internet of Things could be one of the top 5 mobile app development trends in 2022. It has seen rapid growth in recent years. We also believe that IoT is like a treasure trove that is yet to discover. The concept of smart home devices has seen high growth and popularity among users. Apart from smart home devices, mobiles are also used as IoT devices that could remotely control security and temperature in the house. 

• According to Statista, by 2025, there will be over 75.4 billion IoT-connected devices in use. 
• According to Forbes, by 2023, cellular IoT connections will reach 3.5 billion.
• By 2025, IoT investment by companies may reach up to $15 trillion.
• According to Deloitte, the global healthcare IoT market will be worth approx. $158 billion by 2022.

Impact of IoT in Mobile App Development:

1. The automotive sector and Mobile app development could work very closely. There is a need where customers want to access their vehicle and its statistics in their mobile. They virtually would like to control their vehicle from their phone. Tesla and BMW are a few auto giants that are now allowing users to use their phones as keys to operate their vehicles.
2. More and more electronic appliances and gadgets would be integrated with mobile apps. Electronic giants like Samsung and LG have already released products that have tight integration with a user’s mobile device.
3. More health applications would be introduced that monitor users’ health vitals.
4. With the increase of Smart Cities, the governments and municipalities would be spending a considerable amount of effort and money to monitor and detect suspicious activities on the move.

5. Cloud Apps:

Cloud computing is not a new technology, but it has been integrated with the mobile industry. Cloud services are playing an important role in mobile app development as they help users to store their data, files and execute complex tasks in the cloud, in turn freeing up the device’s space. It provides very cost-efficient development solutions.

Cloud Apps could be one of the top trends in mobile app development and we believe it as well based on the following stats:

• According to Forbes, 83% of enterprises will transfer their workload to the cloud in 2022.
• By 2028, the Cloud communication platform market size is expected to be $22,408 million.
• According to Statista, by 2023, both the insurance and telecommunications industries plan to have 11.4 clouds.

Impact of Cloud Apps in Mobile App Development:

1. BAAS is a very trending concept. In today’s time most of the mobile developers are taking benefits of cloud backend and we anticipate that this would only grow in 2022
2. Using a cloud backend not only helps reduce the work of mobile developers but also improves the performance of the mobile app as most of the logic gets executed in the cloud.
3. The cloud integration with mobile apps would also help a mobile app to scale easily. In today’s time every cloud service provider works on a pay as you go model so if the traffic increases the service provider can help allocate more resources in real time and hence the apps and its features are easily scalable.
4. With cloud mobile based apps, the storage capacity is no more a concern. The cloud service providers enable the mobile developer to use huge storage capacities at a very cost effective rate. We believe that most of the mobile apps would be bypassing the local device storage and bank more on cloud storage.

Conclusion

With the ongoing spread of the Covid pandemic, mobile app development is also advancing rapidly. People are indulging more in online apps that have pushed companies to keep up with the trends and provide a personalized experience for consumers. 

With the given blog we tried to focus on top 5 trends that we feel would highly impact mobile app development in the year 2022. That being said, we are sure that there would be other technology advancements that would impact the mobile development community.

If you have any project ideas or you want to develop a mobile app for your business, we are here to help you. Contact us, we would love to discuss your idea and sort out your queries.

8 MOST COMMON UI FAILS 2022

With the world getting online and more than 576,000 websites made every single day, how functional and user friendly your brand’s website/web solution is makes or breaks it, having a huge impact on your sales. Discoverability has become a big important step for the success of any brand; and strong, usable and user appealing UI designs have started becoming the differentiating factor enabling brands to get discovered. 

One of the hilarious examples that always come to my mind while thinking about poor UI is the image below, which was taken at a New Jersey station:

Source: Twitter

It seems that the UI for this machine was drafted without even thinking about the actual physical machine where it will be used. The numbers on the screen and the buttons completely throw the user off, making the usability of the machine an absolute pain.

People at large, still use UI and UX interchangeably and that itself is a paragon of how misunderstood this whole branch of the project life cycle is, giving one too many chances for brands to screw up the UX mainly by using a poor UI. What differentiates a good UI from a bad one? We’re here to elucidate that in brevity:

Traits of a Good UI

• Intuitive – People from all walks of life should effectively be able to navigate through your web solution, without needing a guide. You know you’ve already lost on the UI front when you have to email all your subscribers a new ‘guide’ on how to use your web solution after a major UI overhaul.
• Gently Prodding – Your web solution exists for a purpose. Be it selling a physical product, getting people to subscribe to your services or willingly provide data, among a myriad of other business objectives that you have. Your UI needs to keep that as your North Star and be crafted in a way that gently guides your user into completing that sales journey.
• Exhaustive User Testing – UI and UX professionals often tend to assume a lot of things. This could be a very swift way to have your product ready and shipped in unimaginably fast times, but more often than not, they fail completely. This is because the actual users of your web based solutions are diverse, each having their own priorities and preconceptions on the working of it, which can result in them abandoning your application if it doesn’t meet that. Hence, strong user research and testing such as A/B testing is at the heart of good UI that gets adopted widely./li>

Traits of a Bad UI

• Difficult to Comprehend – Maybe you’re trying to fit in a lot of things in a single page. Maybe you want to get into the trend bandwagon and want to try that hot new font and design style for your web solution that clearly doesn’t go with it. A lot of such factors make your web solution incomprehensible, directly affecting the click rates and adoption of it and plummeting your sales.
• Absence of a Target Audience – They say a building without a strong foundation won’t stand. What if it doesn’t have a foundation? It surely doesn’t have a chance to stand on its own. Not doing proper research about the target audience and crafting your web solution around their needs is a straight up suicide for your web solution.
• Inconsistent Design and Performance Issues – Your website is a journey, and you want people to feel they’re walking on the same path when they visit each of your sub pages/screens. That’s where consistency plays a big role in your UI. Coupled with that, maybe, to stand out of the crowd, you tend to use a lot of elements in your website making it sluggish and unusable, driving your users away. 

Now that we have a bird eye’s view of some of the traits that differentiate the good UI from the bad, here are some of the most common UI fails that are seen in the wild:

Too Much Text

You got an amazing business with a sprawling list of services across multiple domains, we get it. But does that mean you can overwhelm your visitors with huge blocks of text? According to a statistic shared by Nielsen, during an average visit, web visitors spend time on a website enough to read only 28% of all the words on it. However, not all that time is spent in reading. This cuts down the percentage of words read to approximately 20%. 

What this statistic points to is the sad truth that only a very small percentage of outliers patiently read whatever you have to say on your web solution. This is the reason why websites are increasingly using images, videos, animations and microinteractions to keep the users engaged and increase the click through rates.

A website educating about welders, having a super text heavy interface

Text Heavy Auto Scrolling Carousels

Designers love carousels. And theoretically, why shouldn’t they? Carousels allow fitting in a lot of information in a tight space in the website, and have them cycle through as per a fixed time limit. However, this is the exact aspect that makes them less appealing, more daunting and hence creating less interactions.

According to a study done by Nielsen Norman Group, ‘Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility.’ The test that they ran was showing Siemens’ website and asking the question: “Does Siemens have any special deals on washing machines?” The said information was on the first most prominent slide itself, but the users completely ignored that, unconsciously. This, along with other factors made them conclude that carousels are a bad idea, especially when incorporated into the hero section of a website.

Carousel section in Siemens’ Website

The factor that absolutely wrecks the usability of carousels is the fact that the user has no control over the timing of the carousels. Add some text to it and it’s a nightmare for your users, trying to keep up their reading speed with the carousel change timing. If it’s absolutely necessary to keep carousels in your website, the least you can do is keep it non auto scrollable and give the slide change control to the user.

Lack of Typographical Hierarchy

Text is no doubt one of the cornerstone types of content in your web solution. Considering that the websites from 90s were only text, we’ve come a long way from that and the expectations of users have morphed in these 30 odd years as well. 

If there is anything worse in a website than having too much content, it is this: Not having a proper typographical hierarchy. Text in your website should capture the attention of your users effectively, modifying factors such as the typeface, the font, weight and placement of it to either grab the attention of your users the first thing or let it be the secondary thing they notice once they have their attention on your website. 

Shown below is a website with poor typography, not giving it proper textual hierarchy:

Scroll Seizing

I’m sure you’ve come across websites wherein you’re not able to scroll the way you are with normal websites. These websites, generally with the help of JavaScript, completely seize control of your scrolling actions as a means to stand apart from the crowd or have a ‘smoother’ scroll action. The classic use case of this style is by having something akin to vertical carousels, with each scroll taking you to a completely new section of the screen instead of scrolling through a set number of pixels on the screen. 

The problem with this implementation is that the user has no control over what they can see in the screen and the fundamental navigation ideologies that are deeply rooted in their minds through decades of technological evolution are gone for a toss. Considering a case wherein the user is unable to see a specific section of the screen either due to hardware issues or some accessory issues, the user will never be able to see the content in that part of the screen as a scroll would take them to a completely different screen, instead of the content moving up a few pixels.

This technique is ‘controversial’ because it’s one of the techniques that big tech companies use at times as their flagship product’s page, albeit with proper user research.

Big Sticky Navigation Headers

On more and more websites, there are headers that don’t move with the page and are fixed at their position at the top of the website. This, if implemented correctly, can be an anchor point for your website wherein the users can easily find key links to navigate across different key pages of your website, giving them a feel of training wheels for your website.

However, more often than not, brands and companies treat the sticky header as blocks that should represent their brand. This makes the designer make the classic design mistake of keeping form over function in a desperate attempt to make the header reflect the brand. This generally results in a huge sticky navigation bar that covers a lot of precious screen real estate and since it is fixed, it feels more like a pest you can’t get rid of, than a toolbox of quick and easily accessible tools.

Source: ActiveCampaign website

Consider the ActiveCampaign website as shown in the image above. The sticky navigation bar takes up almost a fourth of the screen real estate, giving that much less space for the actual content present in the website. 

Another big mistake in the same lines is using the same navigation bar for both mobile and desktop sites. However, the frequency of coming across such websites is becoming increasingly rare. The classic solution for this is to simply use a hamburger icon replacing the menus of your navigation bar.

ActiveCampaign using a hamburger
menu for mobile devices

One of the better ways a sticky navigation bar can be incorporated into your website is to either have their opacity a bit low so that the background bleeds through it or have a frosted glass look on it, similar to glassmorphism, which would allow a blurred version of the background to bleed through the navigation bar, giving the feeling that the navigation bar isn’t as big as it is.

Super Long Dropdowns

Onto the more finer details of any website, dropdowns can be super convenient in neatly tucking away a couple of options of which only one will be selected. However, managing the content inside the drop down menu can be a challenging task, especially when a lot of options are present inside the single drop down menu. It can easily turn from a wonderful organized closet to a one wherein you push every item you own and never want to open. 

A classic example of this is the Country drop down, as shown in the screen below:

Some ways to circumvent this is to either have the values in the drop down arranged in sections based on the continent. Users can identify things by images much quicker and easier than text. So having the country flag icons next to the country text can be a huge plus as well. Alternatively, you could ask the continent in one drop down and show only the relevant countries in the next drop down. Sure, it will increase your form length by one more field, but your users will have a better time finding and filling it out rather than trying to find their country in a mile long drop down list.

Camouflaged CTA Buttons

From a business perspective, CTA buttons are the most important part of a website. It is what converts user’s interest into hard sales, the main focus of your entire website. So it’s only fitting that these buttons have the highest click through rate and are strategically placed and designed to grab the attention of users and gently prod them to click it and get your sales going and business afloat. 

The most common mistake that designers tend to make with CTA buttons is poor contrast. CTA buttons having poor contrast directly affects the visibility of it, making it less grand and gaining less click through rates. 

One such example is that of Twenty20, a stock photo selling website/app. Having CTA buttons matching the text colour can be a good idea in certain situations, but more often than not, it gets camouflaged with the text, not letting the CTA button stand out as it should.

Poor use of CTA buttons in the Twenty20 website

Another such example is the action buttons which were used by TeamWeek, recently rebranded to Toggl. Soft pastel and fluorescent colours are all the rage right now. The cool mint green colour looks great on the overall UI of TeamWeek, however, it makes the text on the ‘Save & Close’ button hard to read. This could also be put in the pile of form over function mistakes that designers tend to make.

Source: Twitter

Poor Confirmation Messages

What started as a trend to introduce subtle humour into websites; content writers and designers started to introduce ‘witty’ lines in their confirmation popup, where it would put the user who is about to click on the button which would take them to a positive sales flow on a higher pedestal than the user who will be clicking on the link/button that would take them to the negative sales flow. Consider the example mentioned below:

Intended to give a funny twist to your website’s copywriting, demeaning humour can easily be perceived as rude by your users, doing the exact opposite thing of what you desire: driving them off of your website. It’s almost impossible to nail such lines unless your brand identity relies heavily on that and your user base already resonates with that.

Bonus Section!

UI design should be an equal balance of aesthetics and business goals. That said, here’s an example which looks like it is a UI/UX failure but actually are driven by strong unconventional business decisions:

Netflix AutoPlay Feature

AutoPlay feature was always frowned upon in the tech industry. With Facebook and Instagram introducing it in their UI, they made sure that the videos were muted by default. Nobody likes sound blasting out their speakers when they’re not actively attempting to do so! 

Netflix took a different approach when they autoplay the title when users hover on them. This seemingly bad UX aspect actually does have an uncanny reason behind it. Netflix’s target audience generally use their services after a long day and use it as a source of winding down. In these times, Netflix wanted not to bug people down with difficult to make choices, i.e. trying to decide which title to watch, by offering a short video preview of the title. Netflix aims to utilize the ‘lack of motivation’ at the end of the day of their users to serve them with auto playing content of carefully curated list of titles which eventually would increase the chances of users actually watching the title.

Source: Netflix

As is clear from the examples, UI design is a very delicate aspect of the project life cycle and that makes it more easy to screw it up. However, as seen with the Netflix example, not all seemingly bad UI/UX decisions are bad. At the end of the day, design rules are meant to be broken, but what stays as the guiding North Star is usability, reflection of your brand image and exhaustive user research. What works for the top brands may or may not work for you.

7 LEADING UI TRENDS OF 2022

User Interface designs have seen an exponential growth in terms of acceptance and relevance in the Software Development Life Cycle. With more than 576,000 websites made every single day, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for companies and brands who provide impeccable services to their customers to stand out and get discovered. Excellent work and skill is still of primal importance, but that alone wouldn’t cut it! Discoverability has become a big important step for the success of any brand; and strong, usable and user appealing UI designs started becoming the differentiating factor enabling brands to get discovered.

This created a niche in the market for skilled and amazing UI designers and with that emerged specific techniques and methodologies to approach UI design; creating UI design trends. Some design trends are widely accepted and become the new de facto for many software solutions, whereas some of them seem promising but don’t quite take off. Sure, adoption of these UI trends by the big tech giants give them the credibility and cement them as the new normal, but that alone doesn’t guarantee the success of a design trend. 

One such great example of a design trend that looked promising but didn’t quite make the cut into the mainstream is Neumorphism UI. It was an innovative design philosophy that made it look like the buttons and UI elements were protruding from the background instead of being placed on top of it. It was a fresh new design concept with great hopes. However, some critical flaws such as the visibility of the subtleties on low resolution screen, not being usable enough for visually impaired users, poor distinguishing and highlighting factors for buttons and CTA among a myriad of other reasons made it fade away into oblivion. 

That said, these are some of the most happening and popping UI trends for 2022

1. Glassmorphism

One of the most promising design trends of 2022 (and probably the years to come), Glassmorphism has a very clear trajectory on being one of the most influential design trends. One of the main contributing factors for this is the fact that both Apple and Microsoft have adopted it in their latest desktop operating systems. You know a trend is here to stay when two of the top tech giants have adopted it in the flagship products.

Some concepts of Glassmorphism being adopted in Microsoft Windows.

Glassmorphism concepts being used in the MacOS Big Sur.

What is glassmorphism? What distinguishes it from other ‘normal’ designs? To differentiate that, it’s essential to describe the most defining characteristics of it, some of which are:

• Transparency, with a frosted glass effect
• Bright vivid colours and gradients to highlight the blurred regions
• A light border on the translucent objects

A Smart Home Manager App design with Glassmorphism

As is clear with the example given above, for Glassmorphism to work, there needs to be a background with vivid colours or in this case, a photo with multiple colours. It’s for such backgrounds that the feel of transparency, which is a unique factor of Glassmorphism, is most visible.

Glassmorphism makes it easy to give a sense of visual hierarchy to the design. The blurry transparent elements help the users to understand the hierarchy better. That said, Glassmorphism designs would be completely pointless if you have a non colourful background. A great example is given below:

Both images do follow Glassmorphism principles, but the one on the right is more impactful as it has a vivid colourful background; one of the key elements of Glassmorphism.

2. Soft Coloured Gradients

Gradients? Is this the early 2000s? That’s what most designers thought when this principle re-gained a renewed traction in the recent years. Gradients aren’t new when it comes to UI or element design. Remember WordArts? Gradients have been living since long before that.

The Elje Group website, a nice example of gradients in use.

With big brands such as Instagram adopting a bold gradient design in their logo lately, more and more brands are trying their hands on this principle, making it one of the hottest UI design trends to watch for in 2022.

Gradients can help induce a lot of different emotions in your users’ minds, making your designs more appealing and hence your software solutions to be more usable. Gradients naturally direct humans to its focal point, allowing you to steer your users’ focus exactly where you want them to, in a subtle way.

Take this concept design example showcasing an excellent use case of gradients guiding focus of the user to it’s focal point.

Gradients are also probably the easiest to mess up. The most important aspect of gradients is the colour combination. You cannot just mix any colours up hoping it would look good. As a rule of thumb, gradients of the same colour (for example different shades of blue) or of colours lying next to each other in the colour spectrum work well. Gradients also convey a range of emotions, influenced by proper colour choices. Soft blue can be used to induce a sense of peace where as a nice orange to yellow gradient can stir positive feelings.

3. Use of 3D Elements

Although 3D elements were a cool design concept for a long time, they never took off in the practical world due to technical limitations on a wide range of devices, as they dumped a heavy load on the end users’ machines. With modern front end frameworks, technologies and libraries significantly reducing page load times, 3D designs have gained major traction as they won’t be crippling your users’ devices.

3D element in the hero section of a Travel centric website

3D elements are generally placed in the hero section of a website, being the primal attraction piece of the website. They are often coupled with animations or parallax effects where the 3D elements change positions according to different interactions done by the user such as scrolling or mouse pointer movements. However, too many animations of 3D objects could slow the entire website down, hence, keeping 3D animations and elements minimal and effective is key.

An example of a 3D element in the hero section animating as the screen scrolls.

A perfect example incorporating the principles of 3D Element and Gradient in the hero section.

4. Colourless Design with 2D Artworks

A web page design in Colourless UI design explaining its principles

Going quite the opposite direction from all other trends, Colourless UI deals with a monochromatic design, having only black and white colours in the complete UI. This bold design philosophy gives room for plenty of creative 2D artworks to be used in the UI, and gives designers plenty of wiggle room to create an impact with powerful typography and positioning of elements in the screen.

Colourless UI design example

This design is effective just because of how different it is from the rest of the bunch and is a breather among an array of seemingly complicated UI designs with a lot of elements; which are always in trend. Colourless designs work best for content heavy websites as it gives a reminiscing feeling of having a newspaper open in front of the user.

Audio Yoga Mobile App design

However, colourless UI can be a bad idea for product or e-commerce websites, as the lack of colour could be a big restricting factor for proper representation of their key products; going against the key utility of the website/app.

5. Complex Typography

Typography has always been a cornerstone in UI design since time immemorial. However, in recent times, websites are increasingly using typography as their main and sometimes their only focus on the entire website. 

Although images and illustrations theoretically can convey a lot of information without the use of a single word; typography gives a much clearer picture of the information that is being conveyed. The clarity of textual data along with the cosmetic factor of using the correct typeface, size, spacing and many other typographical factors convey a much clearer message in the user’s minds.

An excellent example of a combination of Typography and Animation in the hero section of a fashion collection website

There has been a rise in bold websites where the only content is text and such websites need careful thought surrounding it as it can easily be ruined or worse: misinterpreted by the users. Also, these designs work only if your target audience are not easily disinterested by having no images.

A Website Design incorporating only text as their major design element

One of the key advantages of using typography UI is easy establishment of content hierarchy. More important information of the website can be highlighted using a bigger typeface, and the hierarchy can also be controlled using the text position. For example, in the design mentioned below, there are 4 different hierarchies, highlighted by the typeface and the font size.

An Article Layout design incorporating Typography

6. Dark Mode

Effective use of Dark Mode with varying shades of black to distinguish between different elements and establish their hierarchy.

Dark Mode began as an accessibility feature, becoming essential in terms of reducing eye strain and increasing the device’s screen on time, as the pixels showing the dark (black) colour do not light up in an OLED or an AMOLED screen. With quality OLED displays getting cheaper, and cheaper OLED displays getting better, Dark Mode quickly gained traction and was adopted by major (if not all) operating systems from mobile to desktop. With more than 80% of users from a niche survey group using dark mode (according to this article on Medium), it’s no secret that Dark Mode is sometimes the only mode your user’s OS will be in, while using your application/website. So it’s only fitting that this design trend is all in the rage and will be a permanent design feature for any project.

A dark mode web page design for a wallet mobile application with inclusions of 3D Elements

The key distinguishing factor of such designs is that the basic background colour in the UI will be black with other objects having a shade of black. More and more applications have both, a light mode and dark mode, often changing between them according to the mode the operating system is in. This gives a sense of continuity to the user from switching from the OS controlled screens to your application, increasing usability and adoption rates of your app. This means that UI designers will have to design their products for both, light and dark modes.

A rudimentary screen designed for light, dark and black modes.

That said, there can be many factors that make a Dark Mode design not look good. For example, using a drop shadow on your elements in dark mode will generally make them blurry and won’t have the same effect as it does on a light background. Similarly, as shown in the image below, using saturated colours in dark mode is a bad idea as it will reduce the legibility of the text in your screen.

An excellent example as mentioned by UX Planet, of how using saturated colours in dark mode reduces the text legibility

7. Micro Interactions

Micro interactions are an exciting new addition to the design trends. Whenever we as humans interact with something, be it clicking a button or swiping a notification, we expect the device to reciprocate, to react and give feedback that our actions have been registered and comprehended by the application. Micro interactions are just that. A short animated visual feedback generally shown when you interact with certain elements of the UI.

Micro interactions in play while the user holds the Like button in the Facebook application.

Some of the examples of micro interactions are:

• The refresh animation when you pull down on an app screen such as Instagram or Twitter
• Interactive progress bar while uploading files on applications such as WhatsApp or Slack
• The drag and drop animation while uploading a video or file on platforms such as Google Drive or YouTube Studio

Micro interaction example denoting that a button has been pressed, giving users the necessary feedback that the page change has been done.

Micro interactions can also be used to lucidly show the users something that would be complicated if shown via text or images. A nice example of this would be the way Apple Card shows the interest charges on your credit card. This can be a complicated thing to tell your users, but Apple nails it with these microinteractions wherein the circular slider turns from a red to yellow to green showing the interest that would be charged if the user decided to pay x amount of their credit card bill.

Apple Card using microinteractions to elucidate complicated interest calculation information.

That said, there can be ways where this trend can be butchered; and using complicated animations and overusing them is at the forefront of that. For example, in the design below, almost all the actions performed by the user have bold and ‘in your face’ type of microinteractions and just because a lot of them happen at the same time which aren’t in the same visual hierarchy, (like the animation at the header and the footer of the screen when the user expands an image) they most often than not get in the way of navigation

A lot of the examples above state that quality UI designs are the ones that do not stick to a single design trend, but utilize multiple design trends by carefully understanding their audience to know which trends do and do not work for them. There are few design trends that are objectively good or bad, but there definitely are many designs that are bad for a specific use case and specific user group. Context is all that matters in UI design.

As mentioned in the beginning of this article, there can be hundreds of design trends that seemingly would take the entire UI world by storm and be the new norm, but fail to do so. We at Creole Studios are obviously not design prophets but if we had to take a safe bet, we’d stack our chips for Glassmorphism UI and Dark Mode UI. The fact that big giants have taken it into their own flagship products cement these trends and ensure that they’re here to stay. Here’s to more exciting UI trends in the months and years to come!

REACT – A BLESSING FOR CLIENTS & PROGRAMMERS

Founders and business owners are sometimes under pressure to innovate quickly to compete, as well as increase profitability for investors, shareholders, or customers. And thus, require the best applications with great UI/UX, fast interactivity, and quick development cycles. 

Additionally, we have seen cases where an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is required by our clients within a strict deadline to raise funding. All with minimum resources available. Not forgetting clients who necessitate a production-ready application to be built quickly or have developed their applications partially and would love us to complete them. React has solved the above predicament for us on multiple occasions. 

React enables cross-platform development of apps for platforms such as iOS, Virtual Reality headsets, and Android.  As a result, allowing programmers to become full-stack developers literally overnight. So, what is really beneficial about this so-called flexible and powerful programming language, especially for clients, start-ups, and programmers?

React’s Technical Superiority

Currently considered a premiere JavaScript library, ‘React’ as the name indicates creates an instant reaction to change. Delivering custom UIs for web apps with a minimalistic delay with massive amounts of extensions and tooling building up around it, there is no surprise about its traction. 

Initially released React to the public in 2013 as an alternative to existent standard MVC (Model-View-Controller) frameworks, React was intentioned as a scalable library that would work in a more responsive manner in comparison to traditional directive-driven programming languages. All this whilst encouraging the reusability of components that full-stack programmers create. 

Despite allowing you to place HTML code inside JavaScript with one-way data flow coupled with reusable components, you still need a back-end to provide resources (data). React is normally used with Node.js as the back-end tool, though it can be used with pretty much any back-end technology.

Why is React such a big deal and gaining massive popularity?

1. React is like a jack-of-all-trades, always capable of getting the job done in a relatively easy, understandable manner. It’s simpler to understand where your data is coming from, where it flows through, and how it gets updated. Unfortunately, multiple frameworks abstract a lot which can prove problematic when you have a larger application and need to know why something isn’t working the way you expect it to.
2. React has a thriving eco-system, One-way data binding, Code reusability, and allows for faster time to market.
3. React champions functional programming over object-oriented, which is advantageous for testability (shorter testing cycles), lightweight code, and conceptual reasoning as components are pure functions.
4. Not forgetting that its component and data patterns improve code readability, which eases maintenance of larger apps.
5. React offers server-side rendering (SSR) which allows you to achieve page load speeds below 1 second, which is great for SEO too eventually.
6. React’s virtual DOM refreshes only parts of the page and thus is faster than the conventional full refresh model, and thus improving app performance and faster programming. Additional credit also goes to its diffing algorithm for the speed.
7. React also embraces unidirectional data flows through Flux architecture. Additionally, its one-way data flow allows you to know exactly where and how data is mutating, allowing you to know how your data gets updated, ease, and app maintenance. Consequently, React allows a more predictable flow, hence easier debugging and reducing redundant code.
8. Furthermore, it’s highly extendable and maintainable since its components are formed by a unified markup with its view logic, making the UI easy to extend and maintain.

The Innovation of React Native

With the widespread acceptance of React, the team at Facebook later in 2015 decided to extend its capabilities beyond web applications with a ‘hybrid’ variation designed for native cross-platform mobile software development. In essence, allowing development of mobile applications with web technologies. 

Despite utilising the same principles as React, in React Native the syntax and workflow remain similar, but the declarative components are different. React Native’s component-based structure allows app development with a more agile, web-style approach than most hybrid frameworks. Specifically, using the same fundamental UI building blocks as regular iOS and Android apps but leveraging JavaScript and React. 

Open-sourced by Facebook, React and React Native allow for more comprehensive cross-platform development from one similar codebase on both mobile platforms, iOS, and Android and web. This is amazingly beneficial to programmers on a budget as mobile and web apps can be written by the same developers, allowing for smaller and more manageable teams.

What were Facebook’s intentions when creating React?

Initial speculation suggested that Facebook wanted to keep up with Google’s Flutter and Firebase. Similar speculation travelled after the release of GraphQL. In retrospect, React was engineered to solve the significant issue of how to better build large applications where data frequently changes. 

A practical issue that occurs in most modern real-world apps! Ideally, the majority of the popular frameworks are MVC-based or MV, though React isn’t really an MV* framework. Particularly, it’s a JavaScript library for building composable front-end interfaces for UI components whose data changes over-time. 

Basically, unlike popular JavaScript frameworks, React doesn’t use templates or HTML directives, but rather allows the building of user interfaces by breaking the UI into many components. That’s basically it for the platform maintained and open-sourced by Facebook.

Who else uses React apart from Facebook Companies?

Specifically, Facebook uses React as the main script blended in its application code. With React Native responsible for displaying its iOS and Android native components instead of the DOM elements. We shall talk about the virtual DOM feature shortly. Similarly, WhatsApp and Instagram hugely leverage React, which is evidenced by the unique Instagram features. 

Companies such as Walmart benefited from the ability to reuse 95% of their code while sharing business logic between mobile and web. Furthermore, Yahoo! does use React as Facebook owns Yahoo! Practically, Yahoo opted for React JS because React implemented one-way ‘reactive’ data flow, independently deployable components, and its virtual DOM allowed the client and server-side rendering. 

Notably, Netflix adopted React mostly because of its startup speed advantages, runtime performance, and modularity strengths.  React is basically a huge asset for young startups with limited engineering resources because of the above reasons. Additional honorable mentions of other React users are Airbnb, Spotify, New York Times, and Khan Academy.

What products can React help you develop as a business and start-up?

As we have seen, React increases developer productivity through reusable components and development tools which eventually help if you want to do things done quickly. Clients and start-ups can have lesser expenses of time and resources as they less time coding and more creativity and building. 

Consequently, you earn more money in less time, which is a unified goal amongst small companies and startups. If it takes too much time to build a simple app, you’ll lose money. Though, if you can deliver products quickly, you can earn money quicker. Ideally, React allows programmers to primarily create large web applications which can change data, without reloading the page with a component-based library. So, it can be used to:

• Build data-heavy websites or applications.
• Websites or apps can be categorized into multiple components.
• Basic real-time web applications like chat apps.
• APIs that are capable of handling multiple I/O requests with the capacity to scale.
• Streaming apps and apps that are capable of handling traffic spikes.

What sets React.js and React Native apart and What problem is it solving for both the Client and the Programming community?

Ironically, the world seems full of JS libraries and frameworks, with multiple ones released annually, so why React? Two main reasons come to mind:

1. Its flexibility, code reusability and scalability strengths! This allows programmers to go through one process for iOS and Android. Which is cheaper, faster, takes less planning, less debugging strains, less miscommunication issues and smaller group of programmers.
2. Improves production speed! The normal native application development cycle is fairly inefficient with slower development times. For instance, with ‘compile, push to device/emulator, run’ functions, hence less developer productivity. React Native design quickens the process since it automates code refreshes and, instead of recompiling, it reloads the app instantly.

How React is enabling programmers go full-stack.

Basically, React is levelling the playing field by allowing ordinary JavaScript developers to become full stack programmers overnight. All you technically need is to become conversant with Node, Redux etc. This is simply because its modular architecture allows programmers to build the most complex apps that are both cross-browser and cross-platform. 

React more closely aligns with the mindset of JavaScript developers over HTML/CSS developers and is more hire-able than several other lesser-known frameworks/libraries. Essentially, a developer can become a full-stack engineer with React and Node allowing him/her to develop for multiple platforms with one code base. In retrospect, programmers can take React and easily plug it into most stacks. This is key as React will be around for a while which is imperative when creating a large-scale web application that you plan on having thousands utilize.

How can a programmer use React and enhance his skill-set?

Firstly, arguably 99% of what programmers might require on the front end can be done with only React as a library with React-specific components. And majority of developers use React with Node.js as the back-end. Nonetheless, when building on a real-world application, programmers can enhance their skills with React by adopting the following tools:

1. Learning Redux or any other equivalent library for state management. Unfortunately, React alone should not be used to manage the state of your application especially when going enterprise.
2. Leverage either Axios/Fetch/SuperAgent libraries for performing API calls with Node.js. Essentially, regardless of the backend technology you may prefer, you’ll have to transfer data from backend to frontend and vice-versa.
3. Utilising Webpack/Grunt to bundle your code and JavaScript files for usage in a browser.

Principally, programmers who leverage React will acquire improved industry-grade skills in global state management, application structure and coding standards, testing of components, container & presentational components and best practices.

React’s Future

While more businesses are now adopting React, the Facebook team is continually improving and solving issues with the library. React enthusiasts should expect new render types and future improvements in error handling and server-side rendering. This is a huge plus since its community support is growing daily as evidence by StackOverflow which has over 55K questions related to React. 

This will cement its growth and dominance. Additionally, its flexibility to extend existing native projects whilst supporting multiple platforms with a single code base is amazing. In the era of millennials, clients are seeking swifter development cycles, flawless performance, and highly engaging apps. React’s future seems very sustainable and will give multiple businesses the confidence that it won’t die out after they have invested in it. And Facebook’s continual support will see to that sustenance.

Conclusion

React has the backing of one of the largest companies in the world, and is actively being maintained, so will likely stay for the long haul. In conclusion, we’ve seen how React allows programmers to be more efficient and full-stack, not needing to write duplicate code for multiple platforms. 

Furthermore, we have seen its benefits such as high reusability of components, allowing for easier scalability. We have been able to hint on why native apps are the bomb, as they provide for more optimized performance and can take advantage of the latest technology more fluently. The bottom line is React allows you to create production apps with sophisticated UIs in less time and with greater maintainability. Well, that’s it for now, why not ‘react’ and get your cross-platform app MVP or application started with us.

If you want to hire React developers, Let’s Talk!

11 EFFECTIVE WAYS TO SCALE UP YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE FOR HIGH TRAFFIC

A sluggish website or timed-out server is not ideal for business any business and brand reputation. Such downtime can have detrimental effects to profitability or trust. Websites must be able to anticipate and prepare for new traffic coming its way, so that they are proactive rather than reactive. This is simply because you never know what might trigger a temporary spike in traffic. For example, if you run a blog, it could be a post gone viral. Just a few seconds of downtime can lead to loss of thousands of dollars as most internet users are impatient. That said, WordPress is well capable of managing high volumes of traffic, though a lot of contingencies, configurations and set-ups must be intentional. Let’s take a look, shall we?

1. WordPress doesn’t handle traffic. Hosts (Hosting companies) do!

As a website engine, WordPress itself isn’t mainly responsible for handling your potential high traffic. The traffic-handling capability majorly depends on your hosting platform. Unluckily, a virtual machine hosting your WordPress website can be a single point of failure as an issue with a single instance can cause a loss of service for your website.  As a matter of fact, some hosting servers limit your traffic threshold while others require you to upgrade your account if your traffic increases beyond a certain threshold. So, what basics should be on our hosting provider checklist:

• Firstly, ensure your provider accommodates the latest WordPress versions effortlessly. 
• Secondly, check to see if they will allow you to exceed your cap (your site’s transfer speed limit and bandwidth, when you start getting a lot more traffic)
• While shared web hosting can be great when starting out on a low traffic project, once you pick up, you’ll need to shift to a virtual private server (VPS). Your provider should have provisions for a VPS.
•  Vertical scaling should be allowed with tiered plans so customers can easily upgrade to as needs change. Scaling resources to improve performance can mainly be achieved by vertical scaling. In essence, by increasing the size of the virtual machine running your WordPress website. 
• Check to see if horizontal scaling is available too as it separates your website into various layers. For instance, separating front-end server, database server, proxy layer, and image layer, making it easier to scale resources.

 

Quick Tip: If you can, avoid deploying a cPanel/WHM (WebHost Manager) on your high-performance WordPress server as it can slow down your high traffic website. 

2. Utilizing Elasticsearch on your website

 Particularly MySQL and MariaDB are not famous for their search capabilities. Neither were they built with that strength in mind, and it’s one of the reasons why WordPress team is not able to improve the search logic. Written in Java, ElasticSearch is distributed, fast, RESTful Search engine software meant for search and analytics. Notwithstanding, Elasticsearch can be leveraged to speed up querying of the WordPress database. Specifically by building an index of the content of your site’s database, ElasticSearch can be used to search this index much faster than a MySQL query can whilst performing the same search. Elasticsearch can also be integrated by installing ElasticPress plugin to generate query results with Elasticsearch rather than MySQL. This can improve performance and set you up better to handle high traffic.

3. Less Graphics and more optimized media 

To prevent website failure during spikes in traffic, you can reduce the number of graphics you have in the design of your website. The contingency of optimizing your media is ideally supposed to help make your site lighter and load faster. Getting the best page speed performance can be a good safety net during high traffic episodes. Three basic practices come to mind.

• You can use compression plugins for images and lazy loading as it will only serve images to visitors once they reach those parts of your web pages, and not sooner.
• Always ensure you limit the media on your site to only essential images, if you can.
•  Furthermore, embed videos from services like YouTube and Vimeo onto your site! Then uploading full videos on your site.

Read More : Tips to improve speed of WordPress Website

4. Less Plugins 

Seems our theme thus far is ‘less is more’. But fret not, we still have some great tips! Ideally, WordPress Plugins are files that are “called” by your installed WordPress Theme. Plugins can easily extend functionality or add a new feature to the web system. But a poorly coded plugin often loads too much bloat even when it is not needed. 

Technically a naked instance with no themes or plugins might perform pretty well under load. But who wants a naked theme? Additionally, most plugins can be unnecessarily complex and bloated. This increases page loading speed which slows down your site. So, make it a point to avoid overloading your site with plugins to avoid your theme from making too many queries to the database which can lead to increased activity on your server, which can result in potential server failure. Key points:

• Delete Unused plugins
• Turn off plugins you don’t need. 
• Use essential plugins. Avoid unnecessary or experimental ones. 
• Periodically audit your plugins often to assess their size and quality etc.

Read More : Are WordPress Plugins safe to use?

5. Leveraging a Content Delivery Network

Hosting a web system in different geographical locations is not as simple as it sounds. The websystem may experience different loading speed depending on how far your visitor is geographically located. At such times, CDN turns out to be very helpful. CDN stores a cached version of your website resources on various servers in different parts of the world. This helps in maximizing your server’s performance ensuring traffic overages don’t occur. Using a CDN can reduce the loading speed of your website for your visitors around the world. 

Read More: Migrate your WordPress Website to Cloud Platform

A CDN enhances the functionalities of a server by caching static content like images, JavaScript and CSS files. Thus, when a visitor visits your website, they are served from the server closest to them which results in faster loading of your website. CDN helps in avoiding server loading in high traffic since website files are distributed and saved to several different data locations across the world. To summarize the CDN advantages:

• Site speed increases— it loads faster.
• Allows you to handle more traffic as the load is shared between your hosting provider and the CDN platform.
• CDN helps save bandwidth on your website.
• CDN helps protect your website from denial of service (DDOS) attacks as multiple requests will be shared across multiple servers.

The most popular ‘free’ CDN alternative is Cloudfare which you can utilize on your WP site. Cloudflare Free CDN is great because of the following:

• No Bandwidth Charge: Unlike most CDN services, Cloudflare doesn’t charge you for the traffic. Most CDNs can charge you to purge your cached content from their CDN.
• Global Coverage: With over 100+ data centers across the globe, Cloudfare operates at several exchange points, and thus it is always near to your customers.
• Security: They are considered a security organization, and their “CDN” is essentially a distributed reverse proxy. Thus, add security pros to their menu.

6. Consider using a Stateless Web Tier

Essentially, a stateless application requires no knowledge of previous interactions and basically stores no session information. In retrospect, a stateless application can be scaled horizontally since any request can be serviced by any of the available compute resources, basically web server instances. Consequently, when that capacity is no longer required, any individual resource can be safely terminated. For example, after running tasks have been drained or served their purpose. In a stateless web tier, resources do not need to be aware of the presence of their peers, all required is a way to distribute the workload to them. You can apply a stateless architecture to handle potential anticipated high traffic.

7. Database Caching & Optimization

Database Caching is important as it will reduce the database calls and speeds up loading time of the web system. When most queries are served from the cache, the number of queries that need to hit the database is reduced. This results in improved database performance. The other way to improve efficiency of the database is by putting a cap on auto-loading queries and storing frequently accessed pieces of data in memory for low-latency access. Though it’s important to use query caching and proper indexing to improve database performance, it can reduce latency and increase throughput for read-heavy application workloads. 

The database will have much more information after using it for a while which you don’t need anymore. This will reduce the performance  and efficiency of the system. Revisions are one of the reasons which results in creating unnecessary information in the database. Revisions is a WordPress feature which enables you to save revisions of your pages, posts or custom post types automatically. By default, it autosaves your work after every 60 second. One can manage these autosave intervals by defining  ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’ in the ‘wp-config.php’ file. You can save revisions every 30 seconds, 2 minutes or as per your requirement. Revisions can also be completely turned off. Also you should know that turning off revisions does not improve site’s performance. 

To get rid of all such unnecessary data, you need to optimize the database. WordPress primarily employs MariaDB or  MySQL databases. Thus, either by optimizing MySQL/MariaDB settings or by providing more memory and processing power an overworked server can help.  Also, there are various plugins available in WordPress which allows you to clean the database. The plugins help you delete the unused tags, revisions, trashed posts, etc. and will optimize your database.

8. Using the right caching Plugins 

When experiencing downtime, caching plugins can generate HTML files of your website, which is beneficial when traffic goes up. When choosing a caching plugin do pay attention to some aspects such as:

• Update availability 
• Content delivery network and SSL Integration
• Page caching abilities
• Database caching strengths

Your caching plugin should offer CDN integration though my personal recommendation is the W3TC caching plugin.

9. Ensuring Site Security 

Security affects the scaling of a WordPress site as high traffic implies more potential threats to watch out for. And thus, professional security plugins can protect your website from malware, SQL injections, spam, DDoS attacks, etc. simply by offering the following:

• Active security monitoring
• Brute force attack protection
• Malware scanning 
• Security monitoring and management (especially for DDoS),
• Blacklist monitoring
• Security hardening and Post-hack actions
• Firewalls

In addition, you can take personal contingencies such as:

• Strengthening your wp-admin passwords with 2-factor authentication
• Limit login attempts on your site
• applying an antivirus to your network Use SFTP instead of FTP
•  Hide wp-config.php and .htaccess files
• Use a VPN Virtual Private Network when not using a network you control.
• Use a VPS Virtual Private Server to have greater control over your server environment.

10. Leverage Bytecode Caching

PHP script is parsed  and compiled each time when it is executed. So ideally, by using a PHP bytecode cache, the output of the PHP compilation is stored in RAM, avoiding the same script from having to be compiled again and again. Consequently, this reduces the overheads related to executing PHP scripts, resulting in better performance and lower CPU requirements. OPcache can help with bytecode caching. 

11. Apply Load Balancing techniques 

Load balancing effectively distributes the incoming network traffic across a group of back-end servers, a server pool or a server farm. As high-traffic websites serve thousands of users, concurrent requests are inevitable, so to cost-effectively scale, load balancing is advisable. Ideally, with a load balancer, if a single server goes down, it redirects traffic to the remaining online servers. A load balancer performs the following duties:

• It distributes network load or  client requests efficiently across multiple servers.
• It ensures high reliability and availability  by sending requests to online servers only. 
• It provides the flexibility of adding or subtracting the servers as per the demand. 

 

To demonstrate load balancing, we can use the example of wordpress.com (not wordpress.org) which is effectively one WordPress multisite install running across thousands of servers in multiple data centers. Particularly, WordPress.com as a site builder hosts multiple sites through its HyperDB to load balance and distribute its millions of tables throughout separated database instances, all linked to a central database. Which is why wordpress.com sites can handle high traffic seamlessly as they distribute end-user requests to multiple web server nodes, essentially load balancing.

Can a self-hosted WordPress site handle 100k simultaneous visitors?

The question of the day, right? In theory, yes, though a lot of effort will have to go into achieving this outcome. You’ll need to perform a site audit and most certainly involve:

• load-balancing
• MySQL replication
• Static Content Offloading
• Elasticity of your server architecture.
• Reputable CDN provider
• An efficient comment management system such as Disqus
• Maximize caching efficiency
• Leverage elastic cloud deployment
• Frequently leverage Analytics & tracking tools such as WordPress Stats, and Google Analytics
• Utilize a high-performance HTTP server such as NGINX.

To say the least, a lot depends on hardware and what types of plugins you are using. You can consider using a separate cloud storage for media and uploads and then have a plugin that directs user’s uploads to the storage rather than the local file system. Alternatively, if you’re using AWS instances, consider architecting your site across multiple availability zones within a Region to increase the reliability of the overall architecture. Additionally, use SSD Drives and avoid HDD, as solid-state drives are more reliable, secure, and fast than their HDD counterparts.

Conclusion

In conclusion, optimized media, scripts and caching won’t really help if your server is slow, crowded, shared or improperly set up. So, I’d recommend you use a NGINX server as it’s more performance oriented. Additionally, ensure to use CDN caches and if you can, then you should go with Cloudflare for added performance boosts as it will decrease resource usage on your server, like bandwidth. Notable mentions involve keeping Your WP version and theme updated regularly. For any additional information and queries, feel free to reach out to us.