Website development can have many challenges, but here are some that you can’t afford to ignore, along with reliable solutions.
Web development projects often face different challenges. From enhanced user experience to faster loading speeds and higher responsiveness, there are several challenges that you may face. So, we have compiled a comprehensive list of such challenges and practical solutions to cope with them.
Increasing the user engagement
Providing a modern user experience
Scalable architecture to cope with peak traffic
Cost optimization
Further, FIH was using Enterprise Web Content Management (EWCM) platform at the frontend, which had higher costs and dependencies. As a result, FIH migrated to a Headless CMS saving software costs and reducing vendor dependency.
It also helped the organization serve content to more than 1,00,000 users daily. However, web development challenges can vary for different organizations depending on their business complexities and opportunities, and like a lock-key combination, they need specific solutions. So, here we will discuss some of the biggest web development challenges and potential solutions for your development projects.
Top Web Development Challenges & Solutions
.1 Browser compatibility
Browser and platform compatibility are typically one of the biggest challenges for web developers. Therefore, you need to make sure the sites work on all the existing browsers on the internet and devices of different screen sizes.
This step becomes crucial due to legacy browsers that do not support modern features, security measures, and layouts. One of the most famous examples of legacy browsers being a nightmare for web development is Internet Explorer. Due to its poor performance, Microsoft announced that its services will be discontinued after June 15th, 2022.
Why is IE a nightmare?
It does not support modern Javascript standards
It is not compatible with several modern CSS properties
It has a lower speed in comparison to other browsers.
As a result, you need to make extra efforts to enable your website to work on such browsers which is no less than a challenge. Prioritize maintaining website compatibility across different browsers, especially when you have to deal with legacy browsers like IE or others. Apart from the inherent problems of legacy browsers, you will also have to deal with some common issues like, Doctype error: A doctype code is one of the basic codes checked by legacy browsers before rendering. If the code is absent, these browsers do not render the website and lead to poor performance. HTML/CSS validation: Different browsers read the HTML/CSS code differently, which can pose a genuine challenge for website developers. Layout difference: Different browsers support different design layouts. As a result, websites render distinctly as per the layout compatibility with the browsers and cause UX inconsistency.
Solution
The solutions to the above errors are as follows,
Handling doctype error: Add!DOCTYPE html
Validating HTML/CSS: Reset stylesheet to help website switch to basic browser style.
Countering layout differences: Use floats, CSS grids, and Flexbox
Ensuring cross-browser compatibility needs proper testing, and testing your website across different browsers can be truly overwhelming for your teams.
So, here are some tips that you can try,
Refrain from testing your website on different browsers simultaneously. Instead, Switching between browsers every two or three days will help achieve accurate results.
Avoid writing browser-specific native codes as they can lead to serious cross-browser compatibility issues.
These tips can surely optimize your website’s browser compatibility, but if the user interface(UI) is not optimized, it can still result in bad UX. Users that visit your website interact with the interface and that is why a well-designed UI becomes vital.
2. User experience
Designing UI and developing UX both need to go hand in hand if you want to create innovative experiences for your users. However, there should be an alignment between the designing process and the intended outcome to build reliable website UX.
Not to mention, synchronizing the web design and frontend development becomes even more challenging if you have separate teams. One of the most critical challenges that web development companies face is the lack of context on what a user may expect from a website’s UX design. While many firms employ user research to understand user expectations, it requires extensive resources that may not be feasible for every organization to obtain.
Apart from the requirement of frontend development, developing a responsive design involves maintaining UI compatibility for different screen sizes according to the device and browser. From mobile devices to tablets and even smart TVs, each browser has a different screen size, which poses a massive challenge for many developers to adjust the UI respectively.
According to Statista, mobile devices account for attracting 54.8% of the worldwide website traffic in the first quarter of 2021. For such a massive scale, ensuring feature responsiveness and seamless website navigation across mobile devices can be a headache for web development teams. Another significant challenge is to create a user-centric design that can enhance user experience. For example, when Airbnb built a User-Centric Design (UCD), it disrupted residential areas in cities like Berlin. This user-centric design enabled the hosts to obtain more details on how their guests would prefer to rent their property to be in a particular look or feel. As a result, it eventually became an attractive USP for Airbnb.
However, this led to the imposition of strict norms like Zweckentfremdungsverbot. Under this rule, a ban on Airbnb operations penalizes a landlord for renting an entire flat with fines up to €100,000. The reason for imposing such strict guidelines was due to property shortages for local residents that were monopolized by higher Airbnb listings.
The bottom line here is that you must build a user-centric design that is profit-driven but also considers different aspects of the location-specific issues. So, you need to consider all the internal or external factors that impact a user while designing the interface.
Solution
To address the User-Centric Design issues, you need proper research of different aspects like user’s location, market demand, existing pain-points of customers, etc.
However, it’s not enough. The amount of analysis and brainstorming necessary for a user-centric design can be massive. Fortunately, there are many approaches that you can take to make research for user-centric design less intensive and accurate.
Online surveys: These are ideal to understand user requirements through a series of questionnaires filled online.
Guerilla research: This approach is excellent for web development teams that need fast validations of the ideas with in-person surveys.
Parallel design: Allow teams to develop alternative designs that can be compared and decide which one is the best.
Using the data from such research, you can design user-centric websites and enhance customer journeys by identifying pain points. It helps you understand different touchpoints in your interface where users interact and accordingly optimize them for enhanced UX.
For example, Twitter Bootstrap is an open-source, CSS-based frontend framework that helps create mobile-first websites. The best part of Bootstrap is that it includes responsive design templates, grids, etc.
Similarly, you can use other frameworks like Angular and React for component-based UI development. While Angular offers material design components that you can leverage for web app design, React has a wide range of ready-to-use components for your UI.
When it comes to designing an optimized and user-centric design, there are many web development frameworks that you can leverage. However, some of these frameworks may not be platform-specific, which is why it is crucial to make the right choice for excellent UI design.
3. Performance & speed
Achieving maximum loading speed for a website is a crucial challenge for any web development company. According to Neil Patel, 47% of the users expect a website to load in two seconds, which is not an easy feat considering the many elements that render with every click.
So, you need to check different website performance parameters to ensure faster loading speeds and responsiveness. There are different tools that you can use to measure website performance, including,
Uptrends
Sematext
Google’s Web.Dev
GTmetrix
Uptime
Dareboost
One of the most popular tools to check website performance is the Web. Dev by Google, based on Lighthouse. Google has defined some of the critical metrics, also known as the core web vitals, that helps in measuring website performance.
These are the core web vitals defined by Google,
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It measures the loading speed of the website’s primary content, which should be less than 2.5 seconds. So, according to Google, your website’s main content needs to load in 2.5 seconds for optimal user experience.
First Input Delay (FID) measures the website’s interactivity through the delay period between user input and representation, which should not exceed ten milliseconds. In other words, the time delay between the user’s input and the presentation of data on the screen needs to be less than ten milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This is a performance parameter for websites that measures the visual stability through the layout shift delay, which should not exceed 0.1 seconds. A higher CLS can lead to accidental clicks, resulting in users having a bad web experience.
Even an accidental click on the “buy now” button on an eCommerce website, which results in checking out a product you did not plan on buying.
First Content Paint(FCP) measures the delay between when the page starts loading and when the content is displayed. FCP can be measured by the loading speed, which are,
Good: <= 1.8s
Needs improvement: > 1.8s <= 3s
Poor: > 3s
For example, we ran an audit for a URL on the Web. Dev tool. The report showcases some performance indicators like FCP, time to interactive, speed index, LCP, CLS, and more. For example, the time to interact is 13.3 seconds. Similarly, CLS and LCP are not at par with the accepted standards.
Apart from the performance, Web. Dev tool measures accessibility via the image aspect ratio and HTTPS usage. It also checks for SEO best practices like browser errors and if the website has a mobile-friendly interface.
Accessibility is measured through different interface elements. Here, the heading elements are not in a sequence, which means the semantic structure of the page is compromised. Faster loading pages and higher responsiveness can improve your conversion rates. However, ensuring better performance and speed is so many different variables at play.
Solution
Ensuring website performance is not easy without optimizing different elements like content, navigational buttons, interface layers, etc. Here are some expert tips to maximize your website’s performance.
Code optimization: Cut down the size through fewer declarations and operators. Next, you can keep the CSS code lightweight and load it inside the <head> with JS(Javascript) as the body. This allows immediate loading of content after it is downloaded from the user’s browser.
Image optimization: Keep the image size optimized for faster loading of web pages. If quality is essential, you can use JPEG or WEBP formats. You can also employ image optimization tools on WordPress like,
Imagify
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Optimus WordPress
Image Optimizer
WP Smush
TinyPNG
Plugins: Try and minimize the use of plugins for features like gravatar, profile tools, website stats, and font tools as more plugins cause performance degradation. Developing high-performance websites and achieving faster loading times can be advantageous for search engine rankings. It facilitates higher visibility and better traffic for your website. Though high traffic leads to the need for scaling which also may serve to be a primary challenge.
4. Scaling websites
Scaling websites is about sustainable performance, whether it’s 10 users per minute or 100 visitors per minute. However, the scalability of a website is not just about scaling servers but about several other elements. One such element is the existing architecture of the website, which can make scaling tedious for development teams.
According to Paul King a data scientist who has worked with giants like Facebook, Quora, and Uber, every web app runs into four major problems while scaling such as,
Search problem: Describes the difficulty of finding the information a user needs amidst a large pool of data.
Concurrency problem: Difficulty in serving the same data to multiple users simultaneously
Consistency problem: Difficulty updating data and representing the information in real-time to users
Speed problem: Difficulty that a website faces in handling more user requests per transaction.
Solution
Building a scalable website depends on the architecture, both for the frontend and backend. Scalability of the backend is related to the ability of your web servers to handle multiple requests simultaneously to reduce speed and concurrency problems.
5. Security
Website security is essential, especially when 50% of web applications are susceptible to high-risk vulnerabilities. Additionally, cyberattacks have increased drastically over the past few years, with only 5% of enterprise data folders protected against threats.
Securing your website is exhausting with several vulnerabilities to counter. For example, passing on unfiltered data to an SQL server, browser, or even an LDAP server can lead to injection flaws. It allows an attacker to induce command functions that corrupt the browser leading to data loss. Another website vulnerability comes from broken authentications. Especially session hijacking due to authentication issues can lead to data risks and identity theft.
Besides, there is an entire list of security flaws mentioned by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). This list includes,
Broken Access Control
Cryptographic failures
Injection
Insecure design
Security misconfiguration
Vulnerable and outdated components
Identification and authentication failure
Software and data integrity failures
Security logging and monitoring failures
Server-side request forgery
Solution
Filtering input data can be complicated, but you can employ an advanced algorithm that filters malicious inputs. The best way to deal with a broken authentication system is to use a framework that offers such security features.
For example, Django offers pre-built authentication features for web development and is known to facilitate the development of the website with protection against cross-site request forgery and SQL injections.
If you are developing an eCommerce website, you can consider using AES (256 bits and up) and RSA (2048 bits and up) standards to encrypt users’ financial data. In addition, some payment gateway APIs also offer extra protection for users’ data transmissions.
6. Maintenance & support
Maintenance of a website is like “Behind The Scenes(BTS)” of your website. Once you make your website live, the real challenge begins. Several issues like unresponsive web pages, security issues, low loading speeds, and performance problems occur after the launch.
Upgrading the website at the core or updating the legacy APIs for security can be trouble. In addition to that, ensuring zero downtime is difficult during the maintenance of the website. During this process, different dependencies among functions can lead to downtime. This is especially prevalent in websites with monolithic architecture where services and functions are tightly coupled.
Solution
When it comes to maintenance challenges, monitoring becomes essential. You need to monitor the vitals of your website constantly to ensure immediate fix of any issue that arise. Furthermore, you need to have a web architecture with minimal dependencies for higher uptime during the upgrade process.
One way to minimize the dependency of functions on your website is to use the microservices architecture. It is a suite of independent services that can be upgraded individually without disturbing the existing system. So, there is no disruption in website functionality during the evolution process.
Some of the key benefits of a microservices architecture are,
Loosely coupled services that can be maintained and upgraded individually
Individual services with their own data models make data management efficient
Lower downtime, latency, and higher website performance
Higher autonomy for web development teams due to independent services
Scaling the website becomes easier with individual services as you can add resources for peak traffic.