Modern web users are caught in the crossfire of a constant battle for their attention. In developing web applications, it is of the utmost importance that you grab that attention as fast as possible, and single page applications (or SPAs) are a fantastic way of doing just that.
There really is nothing worse than looking for information online, only to be greeted with sluggish pages that seem to take an eternity to load. With information so readily available, users that stumble on a slow website are far more likely to look elsewhere rather than to wait.
Let’s take a closer look at single page applications and how they can help you build engagement and user interaction with your website.
A single page application is a way of building a web application such that it doesn’t need to hit the server each time the user interacts with it. Traditionally, user interaction requires the entire application to be updated, but with single page applications, individual components can be modified dynamically. This results in far less data transfer and consequently, much faster load times.
Single page applications are commonly built in JavaScript, which comes along with several benefits, and some inherent challenges. One such example is that crawlers for some major search engines historically lacked effective support for JavaScript, resulting in drawbacks to SEO optimization.
SPAs are a fantastic choice for dashboards and user interfaces that don’t necessarily depend on SEO. Single page applications generally offer a much better user experience, which makes them the ideal way to build areas of your website that users will interact with frequently. For example, single page application architecture is perfect for developing seamless SaaS platforms.
Single page applications are such an effective way of designing user friendly websites that most major corporations use them for web applications that we all interact with almost daily. Some examples of popular websites that incorporate single page applications are:
The common theme is that these are all websites where most of the data stays the same, while user input changes the way we interact with them. Single page applications bring a level of performance and scalability that has seen them implemented in most of the major websites online today.
To understand the benefits of a single page application, it is important to first understand how it works. Put simply, each time a user interacts with an SPA, the page is dynamically rewritten rather than reloaded entirely.
Most websites contain a large amount of content that stays the same. Commonly headers, footers, navigation bars and several other aspects of a website will simply remain static. Single page applications make use of this knowledge by not reloading this repeating content each time the page changes.
Instead, a single page application asks to simply display the content it already had loaded, while only transmitting the new data that changed as a result of user input. This allows the client to render the new information much faster.
Multi-page applications usually make use of a huge number of pages, and each time a user interacts with the app, a fresh new page has to be downloaded from the server. This results in much slower performance, that can often require more development time. Furthermore, the size of multi-page applications makes them quite complicated and costly to maintain.
With our newfound understanding of single page applications, it should be evident that in situations where there are high levels of user interaction, an SPA is simply the better choice. That isn’t always true however, and as with everything, single page applications come with both huge benefits and inherent downsides.
While incredibly versatile, single page applications may not always be the right choice, and there are some instances where multi-page apps may be a better fit.
Historically, multi-page apps tend to be specifically optimized for SEO, while the fluid nature of single page applications means that this is far more difficult to achieve. Multi-page apps are also built to specific security standards, while again, this is harder to achieve with SPAs.
It is also worth noting that single page applications use JavaScript with React, which is known to be a difficult language for tracing errors. This means that maintenance can sometimes be a somewhat lengthy process.
The main draw of implementing single page applications in your web design is the performance that they offer. SPAs provide a fluid user experience that is rarely matched by their multi-page alternative.
Competition for user attention online is fierce, and users know that if they are dissatisfied with your service, they can simply go elsewhere. Modern users demand web applications that are immediately responsive, and single page applications provide just that.
Alongside the obvious advantages in user experience, single page applications also offer several advantages in terms of development. Given how much smaller they are compared to multi-page apps, SPAs are often far less complex, and as a result, are much easier to debug.
Some of the advantages of single page applications include:
At Big Six Studio, we specialize in creating innovative web and mobile applications that provide you and your users with a seamless experience. We take pride in really getting to know our clients and understanding their specific needs, so we can deliver the perfect software solution to help them achieve their vision.
Our bespoke single page applications are built using ReactJS to deliver the best possible performance that will keep your users satisfied and engaged. With a history of working with companies of all sizes around the world from big enterprises to startups, you can trust Big Six Studio to produce quality single page applications for you.
If you would like to know more about our single page applications or any of the other services we provide, contact us today at [email protected], or call us on 0808 901 2007.
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