Progressive Web Apps or PWA have brought a huge revolution in application development. With incredible features such as fast speed, offline capabilities, web push notifications, and easy updates, PWA provides the best of both mobile sites and native apps for businesses. PWAs harness advanced web technology to deliver an app-like experience to users.
Magento, on the other hand, is a robust and flexible eCommerce platform with thousands of themes and extensions available in the Magento Marketplace for enhancing the shopping experience of customers.
Progressive Web Apps and Magento, when combined, can bring various benefits for your eCommerce business.
Progressive web applications help resolve the issue of long loading time and expand your reach in the areas with poor internet connectivity.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) vs Native Apps
| Features | PWA | Native Apps |
|---|---|---|
| Push Notifications | Yes | Yes |
| Offline Functions | Yes | Yes |
| Installation on Home Screen | Yes | Yes |
| Multi Device Compatibility | Yes | No |
| No Download Required | Yes | No |
| SEO-Friendly | Yes | No |
| Full-Screen Experience | Yes | Yes |
| Doesn’t Require Updates | Yes | No |
Let’s delve deep into the advantages of converting your Magento store to Progressive Web Application.
1. Reap Cost-effective Advantages of M-Commerce
The global mCommerce sales are expected to surpass 693 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. The inclination of people towards mobile devices for shopping has given rise to mCommerce. Businesses need a mobile app to leverage the mCommerce growth. But, mobile apps come with the following challenges:
- Developers have to build different versions for Android and iOS and then have to follow a rigorous procedure to get the app published and updated on the app store.
- With 2.7 million apps on Google Play Store (as of June 2019) and 1.8 million apps on Apple’s App Store (as of the first quarter of 2019), it is quite challenging to get your app ranked in the app store.
- The cost and time of mobile application development are high.
Choosing a progressive web app over a mobile app can be a wise business decision. You can provide native-app like experience to customers by modifying your Magento website into a PWA. Magento PWA Studio provides a set of tools to develop, deploy, and maintain a PWA storefront on top of Magneto 2. With PWA, you are not required to build separate websites and applications across Android and iOS. You just need to write code once and then you can run this code anywhere.
2. Make Your Magento Website Easily Accessible Across Various Devices and Platforms
PWA is written in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML and it can run on all popular browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc. PWA lets users create a shortcut to the website that appears as an app-like icon on the user’s device. Progressive Web Apps run in a browser, but the browser UI is removed once the user adds the PWA to the home screen. Thus, customers get the immersive, app-like experience without downloading and installing PWAs. Moreover, a PWA occupies much less space than a native app. The URL of a PWA can be loaded on shared on any device and platform.
3. Your Magento Website Remains SEO-Friendly
Transformation of your Magento site into a PWA does not affect its SEO-friendliness, your web page is still indexable and crawlable. Progressive web apps are optimized for the high-speed and mobile site, which helps achieve a better ranking.
4. Make Your Magento Website Work Offline and Load Fast
PWAs load fast, thus improving conversion rates. All the essential components such as UI and core architecture get cached after the first page load and are stored in the local device. Your app just requires to retrieve new data instead of loading all the components again, during a subsequent launch. The best part of a PWA is, it allows your customers to access your catalog and shop even if the network conditions are unstable.
5. Engage Your Prospects with Push Notification
Like traditional apps, PWAs send push notifications to keep customers engaged with your Magento store. The Push Manager sends push notifications via an EventListener once the customer or visitor of your website provides consent to get notifications. PWAs provide real-time updates to customers on new arrivals, promotional offers, receiving orders, shipping status, etc. and keep them coming back for more purchases.
If you are also planning to convert your Magento store into a progressive web application, partner with an experienced Magento eCommerce development company to get the most out of PWAs’ capabilities for the growth of your eCommerce business.
