Nowadays, there are countless materials that can be used by those that want to learn web development. Most development environments became smart and can catch various mistakes that were problematic for developers some time ago. Also, we have access to various development platforms capable of turning some static HTML web pages into highly interactive applications.

Although we are now seeing smarter technology and platforms that make the work of the developer easier, it does not mean that mistakes do not happen. You can be a wizard at something like Microsoft Graph API and still miss some of the obvious coding mistakes you might make out of pure habit. With this in mind, here are the most common mistakes we nowadays see in web development.

An Incomplete Input Validation

You always need to validate user input on server and client side. Trusting user input is not something that should be in place. Even so, we often see validation mistakes.

A very common result of not validating user input is the appearance of SQL injection. This is one of the most common web attacks these days.

Most of the front-end frameworks offer validation rules out of the box. They are very easy to use. Also, the back-end platforms now utilize simple annotations in order to make sure that the submitted data is respecting expected rules.

Lack Of Authorization For Authentication

Simply put, authentication means knowing who the entity is. Authorization means knowing what the entity is allowed or can do. The mistake appears when authentication and authorization are handled as the same input. Unfortunately, this leaves the door open to an advanced user or a hacker to use the authorization of a regular user to make changes that would not be allowed.

Not Being Ready To Scale

One of the requirements of many companies is launching products as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this usually means having the minimum viable product out, as opposed to something that is perfectly-built.

Because of time pressure, even really good web developers can end up overlooking issues. One that is often missed is scalability. If the web development team does not plan for scaling early, it can turn into a huge future development problem.

As an example, when you store the profile pictures that the users upload on the web server, it is really easy for the programs to access applications. Such images can be served as static content, so application load is low. If the application grows you might end up having to use more servers and stronger load balancers. Although database storage is scaled, it is possible that application scalability fails, all because of something as simple as profile images.

Lack Of Bandwidth Usage Optimization

Usually, testing and development happen in local network environments. When moving to 3G connections or any other network, problems and complaints appear. It is really important to optimize bandwidth usage so that performance is boosted. This automatically means you need to compress HTTP at the server side, minify CSS, JavaScript and optimize image resolutions and sizes.