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May 12, 2020

Why Every Web App
Should be a PWA?

Author i95Dev Admin
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The journey of making your brand’s presence on the web has come a long way, right from a website to mobile apps and now, PWAs. The time when websites were a must, customers used only desktops or laptops for online shopping. Later, mobile apps boomed as users found it convenient, while the brand’s visibility was just a tap away on the mobile screen. Hence eCommerce shifted to m-commerce. There has been a continuous innovation in technology to provide the best possible experience to their users. Today, mobile devices account for more than half of the web’s market share.

Over a period of time, users often noticed that mobile apps don’t function well and are not responsive. Not just that, but there are numerous such difficulties while dealing with a native mobile app. The most common ones are, they are too costly to develop and startups or SMB’s can’t afford it, they are not accessible enough or they face issues in providing better user experience and many more.

Today we talk about the Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and how they are better than native apps.

Related: Why is PWA Important and Why Do You Need One?

Below are some prominent reasons why every app should be a PWA:

Cost-Effective:

As compared to the native mobile apps, PWAs are cost-effective. The native apps are very complex to develop and maintain as well. Developing a native app requires a dedicated development team that takes a huge amount of money and time.

This doesn’t end here, even if you have to make some customizations or improvements in features, it would take you a long process to get a small thing done.

Moreover, maintaining an omnichannel strategy with native apps becomes another challenge, as you need to develop a mobile app for each platform and then maintain them separately. While with a PWA, once developed, it is more than enough to provide similar user experience across all the platforms.

Developing a native app from the start requires specific technologies for all platforms, however, for a PWA all you require is basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Best user experience:

Your target customers are mostly browsing your website through their mobile phone, and the level of user experience you provide can directly affect how they respond to your brand. That is why you need to make sure their experience is seamless right from the time they enter your website until they leave.

PWA provides the best user experience compared to native mobile apps. Not just on one but across all the platforms. It gives users the feeling of a natural app with great speed and responsiveness where it automatically adjusts itself to any screen size and resolution of the mobile phone. A PWA does not make the user wait to view the site’s content but it loads instantly within no time.

It increases user engagement by allowing you to send notifications now and then reminding the customers to finish their intended task on your website.

Accessibility:

The native mobile apps need to be downloaded from the app store, unlike a PWA. For most of the customers, this is often sighted to be an additional step to perform their online shopping task. As a result, many customers may opt for a PWA which is more accessible than downloading a native app.

Not only downloading an app is the pain point here, but also giving unnecessary permissions is what customers are skeptical about. Also, most of the mobile phone users delete the native apps due to lack of storage space.

A PWA does not need to be downloaded and also doesn’t require a large space, all that you need is a web browser to get started.

Autonomous functionality:

A technology that gives autonomous functionality is what people want in this fast-paced world. Something that could work in all conditions, anywhere, and anytime is what pleases the customers today.

A native app does not work in an offline mode and you are just lost if the internet connection goes off. This leaves the customers hanging as they won’t be able to perform the intended tasks on your e-store.

A PWA works in an offline mode functionality that gives the customers access to e-store at any time they wish. It continues to work even if you are accessing a PWA in a shaky network. It loads instantly and never shows a website as being down.

PWAs help in SEO optimization:

In the pool of mobile apps today, visibility for your app on the app store is the biggest challenge. SEO optimization and marketing for your native mobile app consumes a lot of efforts.

PWAs help in SEO optimization which helps customers to find them easily while browsing. PWAs have URLs that are indexed by Google for better ranking.

This helps the customers in finding a PWA easily on Google and they are most likely to use it as it pops in the top search results.

Conclusion

Experts predict PWA to be the future of eCommerce as they prove to be better than the native apps by all means. Top brands like Alibaba, Trivago, Starbucks, and many more have launched their PWAs and have witnessed amazing results like never before.

Want to know more about PWA and how that works wonders? Book a call with our Magento PWA experts now!

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