What is the best method to improve the development speed as a web developer?

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You need to have a full team. The team each needs to know what they’re doing and if they run into something they can’t handle, they need to know who to go to to get it handled. Friction is introduced when requirements have nobody to drive them to completion.

At the very minimum, you need, a client, a project manager, a designer, a front-end developer, a back-end developer, and a senior engineer. One sufficiently-senior engineer can do all the other jobs besides the designer’s and the client’s, but he has to actually know what he’s doing.

Most full-stack developers are not seasoned enough to be able to properly architect a project, nor do they understand the overall concepts of software development enough to make a good project manager. They can work on all parts of the app, but they don’t know enough to be able to make decisions that reduce the likelihood of time-stealing defects.

Once you have all the human resources in place, then the whole team needs to iterate on their workflow in order to produce speed improvements. One member of the team working faster than the others is not going to push a project through to completion any faster. It’s a team effort.

Your senior engineer is the most crucial member of the entire team. When things go south, he is the one who has to fix it. He is the one who has to maintain coding standards. He is the one who is responsible to architect the project.

If a senior engineer is poorly selected, say if he comes from a security background and he’s being expected to orchestrate rapid iterations, then he’s going to make the wrong tech selections for the team and the friction is going to reduce development speed. If he’s well-selected and has a good working relationship with the client, then it can really speed things up.

The problem is that good senior engineers are expensive, and they are easily poached. Ultimately it’s the business that has to decide whether they want a high-performance team or not. If they do, then the price they pay for one is a bargain. If they don’t, then everyone on the team becomes a glorified fire-fighter. Constantly putting out fires, never getting to a point where they have a handle on the tech.