The study has revealed that 70% of online purchases take place through mobile phones, which further reveal that online shopping will continue growing in the coming years as well. 

On seeing these stat businesses get encouraged to bring web portals on mobiles to stay IN and gain users’ attention. And to find a solution to this problem, PWAs indeed have offered a great helping hand.

Let’s take a closer look at this web app option and understand how it can bring benefits to your business.

A quick history of PWA

For many years, responsive web apps have been the answer to engage and retain users in the mobile space. But sooner users preferred to utilize apps and shifted their focus, which led to a serious concern for the businesses. However, to combat this chaotic situation, Google in the year 2015 introduced progressive web app technology. This ensured to bring oodles of advantages to users and gave them an app-like customer experience.

What you should know about PWA?

PWA stands for a progressive web app, which is a website that runs and provides a smooth look and feel of a native app on the users’ smartphones. It makes it possible for the users to access it through the mobile web browser, just the way they access any other website on the computer.

Hold your breath, because this is not just the plus point of PWA, but further, this very web app can be added on the users’ smartphone home screen, just like any other app, and increase the cool quotient to another level.

Why your business must have a PWA site?

Indeed, the development of progressive web apps brings multiple advantages for various industries. And they open a floodgate of opportunities for businesses to interact with customers and generate higher profits. Below mentioned are a few key benefits that help businesses to succeed in achieving their goals. Let’s get a look at how PWAs help your business to scale ahead with maximum benefits.

Offline mode functionality brings ease

When a user goes offline then maximum apps don’t function, but this is not the scenario with PWA. These web apps are accessible even when a person is offline. This ensures your potential customers to browse your offerings at any time. Needless to mention but this drives sales and leads to improved conversion rates.

Flawless app-like experience

First and foremost, you must understand that a seamless user experience gets well defined by the convenience users get while interacting with your app. This is where PWAs make a huge difference. These apps ensure to offer an identical and seamless display across all the devices and make navigation a comforting space for the users. 

Faster speed

The page loading speed plays a vital role in the success of any website, and further to a business. As a website represents your business to your potential consumers, and glitch experienced in its speed, can destroy your brand’s image completely. But not anymore! With the help of the PWA solution, you can bring loading pages in milliseconds, which is around 4X faster than the usual responsive web page. It helps your customers to stay glued to your services and you don’t miss even a chance to impress your users with the improved loading speed.

Initiates self-update

The app update on the smartphone is a time-consuming effort and usually due to the amount of time it consumes, users prefer to ignore it unless it is mandatory. However, this very issue can easily be managed with the PWAs pre-cache feature, which automatically updates itself. Further, it fetches the updated content, and saves your consumers time and effort to update their app.

A simple way to boost SEO ranking

 As we all know that a progressive web app, is eventually a web-only, that helps you gain organic traffic by optimizing content for search engines. It is very obvious for the online users to start with search queries, and in this run, your site appears in the search result more frequently. As a consequence, it leads to growing your business online and has improved SEO ranking.

What all it takes on the technical forefront to build a PWA?

To start with, PWA is JavaScript-based web technology which further needs 3 different components to be developed:

• Service worker- It is basically a JavaScript code element letting PWA to get accessed by the uses even on the offline mode. Also, it takes care of the “push notifications” feature as well.
• Manifest.json- As the name suggests, it is a JSON file, with a file format of pdf or jpg. It has all the information for your PWA site, that further helps in adding it to the home screen and use it as a native app.
• HTTPS- This is a communication medium, that helps the Service worker to fetch the site data in a secured manner, and then display it on the user’s device.

Challenges that come along with PWA development

Limitation to access device features

There is a limit set for the PWA apps to access multiple device features, which further restricts the user-experience in various ways. To overcome, you must ensure to design content in a way that can consume lesser device features.

Excessive battery usage

PWAs get developed utilizing JavaScript, and being a not native language for both iOS & Android, it consumes more battery while running a PWA app. You can easily shrink this challenge, by optimizing the JavaScript code during the development.

PWA is the future!

The tech giants including Twitter and Uber to name a few, have happily embraced PWA in their business model. For a business to get a competitive advantage the integration of PWA is a necessary element. This further helps in providing value to the customer base. Your business must pave a successful path with an incredible digital presence.