Aadhar is the national identity system in India that has over 1.3 billion registered members. The website is located at UIDAI.gov.in
A speed report from Lighthouse paints a rather grim picture and scores the Aadhar website 21.5 seconds on the speed index (SI), and 33 on Performance.
There are many reasons why the Aadhar website is so slow. This includes:
- Bloated JavaScript files
- Unused CSS files
- Unnecessarily large image files
- Old Image formats
- Render-blocking resources
- Slow server
Let’s look at each of these reasons and identify potential ways that Aadhar can make their website load faster.
But before we do that, a quick word about our website CWVIQ.com - we are a free email alert service that sends out notification any time your website is loading very slowly (often due to heavy traffic, or poor scripts). If you have a website, consider setting up an alert so that you can fix issues before they become major. Bloated JavaScript files
Aadhar uses a lot of JavaScript to run the website. However, loading them all from one source could slow up the performance of the website. Aadhar can avoid this by splitting the code into smaller files. This way, you only load files that are necessary.
The Aadhar website can be as much as 7.05 seconds faster by adopting this technique.
Unused CSS files
Aadhar uses CSS files to load the styling elements for the website. However, this file contains a lot of unused scripts that can be slowing down page loading by as much as 0.15 seconds. Code splitting may help avoid this issue.
Unnecessarily large image files
Another common problem that users face – especially when they access the website while on the move – is having to load unnecessarily large image files that are not optimized for the mobile phone. Not everyone has access to WiFi at all times. Loading oversized product images is unnecessary.
According to the Lighthouse estimate, Aadhar website homepage can load 10.35 seconds faster if it made all the images more cellular-data-friendly.
Old Image formats
The Aadhar website uses a lot of JPG and PNG files that are considered outdated and heavy for modern web use. Replacing them with WebP and AVIF files can save as much as 13.35 seconds from the page loading time.
Render-blocking resources
There are scripts on the Aadhar website that need to run first before they let the rest of the code be executed. The render-blocking resources issue can shave off around 1.54 seconds from the loading time for the Aadhar website.
How do you avoid this? If the script is not critical, avoid having it in the <head> tag of your HTML code. But if you do need to have it there for some reason, make sure to include the defer or async attribute so that they do not block the loading of other resources.
Slow server
According to the Lighthouse report, a slow server may be contributing to nearly 3.48 seconds of additional loading time. In addition to upgrading the server hardware and database systems, Aadhar should also look into the server’s application logic to prepare pages faster.
Anand Srinivasan is the founder of CWVIQ, and has been in the internet media space for over 15 years. He has previously served as the AVP of Products and Head of Business at popular media portals. He has worked with several SaaS and enterprise businesses as an external consultant for their SEO marketing campaigns.