Today, building a high-quality and competitive web application requires more than just clean code, a user-friendly UX and good development practices. The success of such a project also hinges on creating a strategic approach and prioritizing components that bring long-term value to both your business and your customer. The following five aspects — security, performance, user-centricity, scalability and cross-platform compatibility — define an efficient, future-proof app that will ensure high return on your tech investment.

In this article, experts from Itransition, a firm with 25+ years of experience incustom web app development, describe five key aspects you should concentrate on throughout the app development process.

Security

With cybercrime on the rise, companies should prioritize security in their web app development projects.

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• Integrate Security in App Architecture Design

An app’s vulnerability is greatly determined by the reliability of its architecture. Therefore, development teams should factor-in security considerations at the project’s initial stages. To create a more secure architecture, teams should first identify cyber risks that can potentially affect the app in the future, by consulting business owners, IT teams and other stakeholders, reading industry-specific cybersecurity checklists and analyzing historical data on similar projects.

Guided by their findings, corporate security requirements and secure design principles, teams can define an optimal architecture structure to build an app that withstands cyber threats. To ensure that the chosen architecture is reliable before implementing it, teams should also conduct threat modeling to uncover hidden design flaws.

• Adhere to Secure Coding Standards

Make sure that the application’s code development process incorporates secure coding practices, such as input validation, static code analysis and version control. This can help minimize potential code vulnerabilities and guarantee that the app code is not susceptible to SQL injections, cross-site scripting and other types of attacks.

• Prioritize Security Testing

If you operate in a highly regulated industry, you should place a strong emphasis on security during the app testing phase. Consider allocating increased resources and efforts to penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, dynamic application security testing and other types of security tests to eliminate even the slightest possibility of costly breaches.

Performance

Software performance is another crucial aspect for consideration during web app development, as it directly affects user experience and satisfaction and determines the app’s success. As for enterprise web apps, slow performance, crashes and errors can also hinder business users’ ability to execute their tasks productively, leading to operational inefficiencies within your company.

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• Design a Fail-Proof App Architecture

The underlying software architecture also significantly impacts application performance, so you need to choose architecture design patterns for applications carefully. For instance, to build a fault-tolerant solution, consider using a fault-isolated architecture with loosely coupled components such as a microservices-based architecture. This way, you can ensure that even if one component fails, it will not affect the entire system and the app will remain operational and available to users.

• Establish an Efficient Back-End Stack

The choice of programming languages, frameworks and tools used to build a solution’s back end also plays a key role in determining app performance.

Therefore, if you’re deciding between multiple alternatives that are relatively equal, consider opting for technologies known for their efficiency and speed. For instance, according to Sharkbench, Spring Boot, ASP.NET Core and Ktor can handle incoming requests within an app more quickly compared to FastAPI, Phoenix and many other frameworks.

User-Centricity

Attracting users and keeping them engaged with your app requires meeting their needs and expectations regarding functionality, usability or performance. Therefore, you should focus on users’ needs from the very beginning of your project and address them over its life cycle.

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• Study User Pain Points, Behaviors and Motivations

To create a web solution that matches user interests, you should first gain a deep understanding of your users by learning their pain points, preferences and habits. Multiple techniques can come in handy in this regard, from one-on-one interviews and large-scale surveys to continuous observation of user behavior, each aimed at gathering different types of insights. Based on your research, you will be able to build user profiles representing the average users of your app and outlining their demographics, behavioral patterns, expectations, context of app use and other relevant characteristics.

• Create the App’s Prototype

Take into account the user insights generated earlier to decide on the capabilities that you want to include in your future app. Design efficient user flows and journey maps and build a high-fidelity prototype representing the preliminary version of the app. The team should then assess the prototype from different perspectives, together with a group of target users, to validate the design and functionality decisions. Based on the feedback, the team can refine the prototype until it fully addresses user expectations and then upgrade it to a successful full-fledged app.

Scalability

If your web app fails to accommodate an increasing or fluctuating number of users, data and transactions without performance or user experience issues, its growth potential can be limited. To be able to scale your app smoothly without costly modernizations, you must ensure software scalability from the project’s initial phases.

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• Adopt a Flexible Software Architecture

The importance of your architectural design decisions cannot be emphasized enough, as they significantly determine whether your app can scale to meet increasing demands. Therefore, it’s essential to plan for app scalability from the very beginning.

For instance, you can focus on modularity during the design phase and opt for loosely coupled components, such as microservices, which can be scaled separately when needed. This approach enables dynamic and cost-efficient auto-allocation of resources to services experiencing high demand, which is impossible in rigid monolithic systems. This also allows teams to quickly deploy updates to individual services without the risk of causing downtime to an entire application.

• Consider Cloud Hosting Instead of On-Premise

If scalability is your top priority, consider hosting the web app in a cloud environment rather than your company’s on-site servers. After all, scaling software in the cloud is much easier and more cost-efficient compared to scaling it on-premise as you don’t have to invest time and resources into purchasing, setting up and maintaining additional hardware.

Cross-Platform Compatibility

If you aim to reach a larger audience and maximize your business’s revenue, you should also emphasize the cross-platform compatibility of your app. After all, a cross-platform web app can be accessed on any device with a web browser and also be uploaded to app stores, which means you don’t have to spend resources on developing multiple native apps.

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• Choose a Suitable Platform-Agnostic Framework

To properly choose the development framework, begin by reviewing your unique project requirements. For instance, if you need reliable back-end technology well-suited for developing microservices, you can explore frameworks such as Symfony and Ktor. On the other hand, if you require an intuitive component-based framework for building user interfaces, you can consider Vue.js and React.js.

After identifying several frameworks that can potentially meet your needs, evaluate them from multiple perspectives such as performance, flexibility and development complexity, to gain a better understanding of each one’s strengths and weaknesses and make a final decision.

• Optimize Your Web App for Different Platforms

It’s vital to optimize a cross-platform web app for various platforms so that it can provide a consistent user experience across different devices and operating systems. In particular, teams should adhere to responsive design practices, including optimizing images, using flexible layouts and implementing CSS media queries to make sure that the web app can adapt to different devices and screen sizes. Teams should also follow platform-specific guidelines, such as Material Design for Android or Human Interface Guidelines for iOS, to ensure that their app provides a native feel.

Final Thoughts

Security, performance, user-centricity, scalability and cross-platform compatibility are the five essential elements of a successful web application. By focusing on these key pillars, developer teams can build more functional, reliable and easy-to-maintain apps that can deliver value to businesses for years to come.

If your in-house team lacks expertise in some of these aspects, your project should not necessarily be delayed or dismissed, as you can enlist the help of a web app development outsourcing firm instead. Professional third-party developers will help you design, build and implement a robust and future-proof web app smoothly and cost-efficiently.