The rise of smartphones accompanied by the lockdown imposed in the past years saw a spike in the use of mobile phones to surf the internet. This had a major impact on the world of retail, as more and more users were interacting with brands via smartphones.
There were two solutions to this—responsive websites and native apps. So where does Magento 2 Progressive Web Application come in?
Understanding the Need for PWA
Both the offered solutions were adequate at best. They solved the basic need to be found on a mobile device, but the customers never preferred using either of them.
Responsive websites- These are made for desktops and scaled for mobile. This might seem great on paper but practically resulted in an imperfect, lagging experience.
Native apps- These are dedicated applications developed to function on only one Operating System. Thus, an iOS native app would only function on iOS devices & not on Android. This feature meant that apps need to be developed separately for both. Apart from that increased cost in production, they occupy your device’s storage to install and function.
What is PWA?
Progressive web applications (PWA) aim to solve the aforementioned problems. They released it to deliver a better mobile experience using a single code based on the browser. PWA embraces the positive features of responsive websites and apps as they are built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript keeping the mobile experience in mind.
Let us go over a few benefits of using PWA.
Improved Performance
The mobile user interface is fast and smooth because of the low-density code compared to desktop sites and applications.
Since it is predominantly for mobile phones, the interface is perfect to operate on smartphones and tablets. The best part? This improved performance comes with an app-like experience.
Runs on Browser
The code for PWAs executes on a browser level. This gives way to many benefits, the most important one being that it enables it to run on all devices with ease.
Laptops, tablets, mobiles, even the ones running on old software, PWAs work well on all of them. As there’s no need for multi-platform development, this option is easier on the pockets too.
Push Notification Support
The mobile experience opens a new aspect of marketing—push notifications. These are little blocks of texts/images (sometimes a combination of both) that are used to engage with customers. It has a variety of uses, from providing discounts to reminding users to complete their transactions.
By using this feature to its fullest, businesses can send curated offers to prospects for an improved conversion rate.
No Need to Install
Mobile applications usually require installation, constant updation, registration & more from the user-end. Studies show that businesses lose many customers at each step as consumers want quick solutions.
As PWAs run on the browser, there’s no need to install them or follow the tiring login procedure. Because of a light code in the background, these load faster than other options and even provide a decent load time with slow internet.
Offline Operation
Progressive web applications use an in-built cache system.
Because of this, they can load pages with a slow connection and even offline using the cached data. This makes it ideal if your target countries have a slower connection as the users won’t abandon shopping whenever the app disconnects from the internet.
Security
The Magento 2 Progressive web applications are fast yet secure.
Since it has a unique URL, it can use HTTPS. This means you can
secure your web application using an SSL certificate as you do with regular websites.
Faster loading times, easy-to-use interface and all the other features motivate the customers to use web applications. This led to a boost in mobile conversion rates for many businesses.
What’s stopping you from becoming one of them?
Hire Magento 2 developers from magePoint to build an amazing experience for your customers as well.
