What's going on in the online mobile market today? I'm receiving visits, but my bounce rate skyrocketed and for some reason, I'm losing sales and conversions... I need to know what's happening!
These are some of the questions we are receiving from our clients, and it's always difficult to diagnose ... The web environment is one of the most dynamic markets in the world and it's constantly changing, morphing and growing into the most unexpected ways you can imagine.
But today we are talking about Progressive Web Apps or PWAs to make it shorter.
Definition: Progressive Web App (PWA) is a Web App that uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like experience to users... It can be deployed as a mobile PWA app or a Native app.
What is required from a Progressive Web App:
To be considered a Progressive Web App, your app must be:
- Fresh - Always up-to-date and maintained by service worker updates.
- Safe - Served via HTTPS to prevent sniffing/man-in-the-middle hacks and ensure content has not been tampered with.
- App-like - App-style navigation and interactions.
- Re-engageable - Make re-engagement easy through features like push notifications.
- Installable - Allow users to "keep" apps they find most useful on their home screen without the hassle of an app store.
- Progressive - Work for every user, regardless of browser choice.
- Responsive - Fit any form factor, desktop, tablet, mobile, or anything else.
- Linkable - Easily share via URL and not require complex installation.
- Connectivity - Will work on low-quality networks or even offline.
- Discoverable - Are identifiable as “applications” thanks to W3C manifests and service worker registration scope allowing search engines to find them.
What this means and how does it affect me?
PWAs are, in better terms, websites that load content as it is presented to the visitor viewport, allowing the site to load as the visitor scroll up or down making the site to be presented extremely fast, no matter the device used by the visitor at the time your site.
Right now Google is pushing this as much as possible making sites using this technology rank better in the search engine and displaying their links as a priority on the search results. This can affect every one depending on Google to drive traffic to their site and it is definitely something to take into consideration when you are looking into making or redesigning your website.
But don't panic... yet... There are a few popular browsers, like Microsoft Edge, that don't support this features (yet). So the push on Google is not 100% definitive, but it will soon be as all popular browsers get aligned with this new way of browsing online.
Why are they doing this now?
As you may know, there are about 2 million apps in the apple store and almost double in the android store. Not all of those apps are downloaded and used at the same rate and for sure you won't have them all on your phone.
Many website owners tried to take advantage of this fact and spent significant amounts of money creating apps to distribute their services, just to realize that there were thousands of other apps like theirs, and the traffic and usage of their app never got to be close to what they expected.
Most of the time those people already had a website and did not realized they could have had redirected those resources to bring a huge increase in their mobile traffic. Instead they fell in the trap of creating an app to offer the same services they already had in their site.
Those are the reasons why the web world has to try and make itself faster and more appealing to the new tendencies, and that is why PWAs appeared as a solution, that for now, comes to the rescue of the mobile web.
What should I do?
If you are one of the people that fell for the mobile app trap that means that you are a person looking hard into expanding your business, so the need of upgrading your technologies will by no means take you by surprise. If you didn't fall into the mobile app trap then this is the perfect time to make your move and get in front of your competition as quickly as possible.
Take advantage of the changing market and make sure you can support the new changes, the sooner you do it, the better it will be for you and your business.