Mitigating partial content update issues on web pages through SPA parameter optimization

Abstract

The experience of recent years has shown that the number of active web applications developed according to the fundamental principles of single-page applications continues to grow steadily despite a decrease in the number of newly created ones. This indicates a shift in focus from the importance of developing anew to the necessity of maintaining, servicing, and optimizing the existing end product. Furthermore, with the advancement and improvement of web development technologies, the potential expectations of users increase, necessitating the provision of a worthy user experience and the enhancement of application competitiveness. A significant role in this process is played by the partial content update process on web pages, widely used in the development of single-page applications. Most modern JavaScript frameworks designed for client-side web development employ the «out-of-box» technique, thereby providing the developer with complete discretion in deciding on approaches to its application. However, the automatic use of the web page content update mechanism does not guarantee desired results and often leads to average or sometimes unsatisfactory values that could have been avoided. This article provides an analysis of the characteristics of the performance parameters of a single-page web application, explores alternative methods to solve the stated problem, investigates potential «problematic» areas of the client-side of applications, compares the functioning of content update mechanisms of the most popular JavaScript frameworks Angular and React.js, and formulates recommendations for optimizing the overall application performance. The article concludes with tables of Core Web Vitals metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of the conducted optimization. Finally, potential vectors for further research are proposed.