Boosting Conversion with Progressive Webapps

Going Back to the year 2003 Nick Finn and Steve Champeon stunned the world of webdesign. A concept where loading the core of the page content first and then progressively adding more layers to it.

Back in 2020 with the broad adoption of modern javascript in almost all browsers it becomes clear that there is more opportunity than ever to create stunning web experiences.

Introducing progressive webapps (PWAs)

PWAs find themselves in the middle of websites and apps. It's basically a website on steroids powered with a native like feeling of an app. No browser bars, offline capabillities, push notifications etc.

?Who should use PWAs?

First of all PWAs are great to test out new products and launch prototypes. Companies that already have a highly visited web platform can benefit from reduced loading times, offline capabilities and mobile focus to enable a better user experience resulting in a higher conversion and adoption. Usage time goes up while loading times go down. By enabling the user to save the webapp to their homescreen you get a prominent place in the users every day usage of the phone resulting in the user visiting your platform more often. The user also has the benefit of saving some space on their memory because webapps don't take up space except for the cache where offline data is saved.

Having pain with users not updating your app? Because Webapps are websites in their core users always get the newest version of your platform. No more update pain.

Manage a single Codebase

A big plus that comes with using webapps is that you only need to manage one codebase. This not only decreases maintenance cost for the codebase but also reduces development time for new features. 

The cons

Even though we at mieli are in love with webapps and their possibilities there are some things that need to be payed attention to. Even though apple being the first to support the idea of webapps and being close to adopting webapps instead of native apps for their OS they are somehow reluctant. Do PWAs work on iOS? Yes they work absolutely great and there are a lot of capabilities added. The one exception? Push notifications. But there are great alternatives that work and have a high level of engagement like sms notifications.

The underlying priciples

Performance - One of the main factors of user bounce rate is speed. A page that takes a lot of load time will certainly result in the user going back looking for something else. Bounce rate increases by 123% according to web.dev when page load goes from one second to ten seconds. 

Responsiveness - Users can choose the device they wan't to access you platform with. Especially for those platforms that still have a high desktop usage like travel platforms an important factor is that users have the option to use whatever device they like best.

Offline Usage - Caching data is crucial. Giving the user an offline experience empowers the users to use the platform even when they don't have a good internet connection.