5 Reasons That You Can’t Ignore to Make Your Magento Site a PWA

What is Progressive Web Applications(PWA)?

Progressive web applications (PWAs) is a website that can be made to look and feel like a mobile app on a smartphone. It is the next big thing in eCommerce. The object to having an experience so uniform that the user is unable to tell the difference between a PWA and a native app.

Magento 2 is becoming a Progressive Web Application Platform and has announced the PWA studio also in the year of 2018, a set of tools used for developing and maintaining a PWA storefront on top of Magento 2. Magento and PWA, both combination can bring many benefits to your online and offline business. Updates are done on the single instance in PWAs. Here are the top 5 Reasons that you can’t ignore to make your Magento site a PWA.

1. No Need to Download App and Quickly Add to Home screen

Your customer won’t have to install any app before using your website. There is an “Add to Home Screen” feature, so once the customer visits your store for the first time on their mobile, they can add a shortcut to your website on their smartphone home screen. From this feature, your website feels like a natural app download and installed on the device. Your PWA needs app manifest to enable “Add to home screen” feature.

What is App Manifest?

App manifest is just a simple JSON text file that gives you the information about an application such as its name, author, icon, and description. It controls how your app appears to the user in the areas that they would expect to see apps like the mobile home screen.

2. Offline Mode is no Longer a Problem

In today’s world, mobile search queries are increased day by day. A poor state of a mobile network is no longer a problem, as PWA also work when your users/customers are offline. Thus, service workers can notify the user and continue browsing the store even in the area where the network is unavailable.  Though progressive web app can work as offline, it can sync and update data in both directions when connectivity is established. Besides, a customer can use all of the modules and function of your PWA. If someone uses PWA, then the less likely it will be forgotten like those poor zombie apps.

3. Website Loads Fast

People now want their search query answer as soon as possible. One survey says that more than 50% of visitors will leave if your mobile version takes more than 3 seconds to load. Progressive Web App focuses on speed and can minimize network traffic. With the help of PWS, the page is loaded instantly in milliseconds, not even second. It provides smoother scrolling and transitioning of pages as the experience “progressively” changes thus removing the need for pages to “re-load”. The app shell contains all the necessary component of your apps such as UI and core architecture. After the first page load, these components are cache and stored in the local device. Therefore it increases conversion also.

4. Your PWA is Searchable – PWA and SEO

SEO is important when it comes to finding your product by the customer. Your PWA is crawlable and indexable. Progressive Web App as itself is a JavaScript and make use of the flexibility of JavaScript. That means Googlebot will crawl this page as it crawls other pages. But developer needs to pay attention that how to optimize the site to ensure the page gets indexed appropriately.

Google crawl PWA sites just like it crawl AJAX and JavaScript, but there are some issues with the way Google crawls and renders a JavaScript page.

Emphasizes below points when it comes to PWA and SEO.

• Make sure Googlebot crawler can access JavaScript and CSS files.
• Use rel=canonical when multiple pages have the same content. So Google can crawl only one URL from multiple URL and can avoid duplicate content.
• Don’t use “#” in the URLs because Googlebot does not crawl the URL after “#”.
• To see your site exactly the way Google sees it, use “Fetch and Render tool” of Google search console.
• Make sure required file isn’t blocked by robots.txt.
• Google isn’t the only search engine. If Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and other search engine are important for your business then remember that some search engine may not support JavaScript or might support a different subset.

5. Engaged Your Customer with Push Notification

If you think a customer won’t like to open a browser each time, then go with push notification feature. With this amazing feature, you can engage with a customer even when their browser is closed. You can easily send your latest product or your offers or a simple reminder to customer easily. Admin can easily manage the Push Notification like add, edit, add, delete any push notification.

When visitor sings up for notification, the server worker’s push manager will handle each visitor’s subscription with a unique token/ID. With the help of service workers, it allows background functions without the need to keep the page open or user interaction. Native notification experience has become an easy reality.

Conclusion
A Progressive web app is a great solution for your Magento website in case you want to turn your Magento website into PWA. If you target the Next Billion Users, PWA is the way to go. Hire Dedicated Magento developer for PWA. It brings out many benefits for your business as a mobile app have the longest future. The technology has already demonstrated that the positive effects and is in demand among e-commerce websites owners. Go with PWA and make your business more successfully.