Progressive Web Applications and the Future of SEO

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are clearly the future of the web. PWAs are set to make an even bigger impact than responsive web design had when it transformed the user experience on the web in 2015 by changing the way websites were built and displayed on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. PWAs enable websites to use native app features that used to require submission and distribution through Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store - things like push notifications, working while offline or with limited connectivity and more.

At Creatuity, we're pioneers of Progressive Web Applications for ecommerce through Magento's PWA Studio. As we've been launching some of the first PWAs for commerce, we've been encountering questions that haven't been fully addressed yet or that aren't common knowledge, and I'd like to share that knowledge with you. The first thing I'd like to cover is the impact of Progressive Web Applications on SEO. PWAs can rely on quite a bit of Javascript, so the question I get the most is "Will Google be able to crawl my PWA? Will Googlebot understand each of my pages, or will my SEO suffer if I'm one of the first to launch a PWA?"

Luckily, a Google engineer is the person that coined the term Progressive Web Applications and Google is on the forefront of work around PWAs. I fully expect that sometime in late 2019 or 2020 for Google to make an announcement similar to what they did in 2015 with responsive web design - that sites leveraging PWA technology will see an improvement in their search engine rankings, especially on mobile. For that to happen, though, Googlebot will have to be able to follow complex Javascript-powered interactions on your PWA-powered site. That's something that was challenging for Google last year and earlier this year, but now that's changed.

Earlier this summer, Google made an announcement that Googlebot, the crawler that crawls your site to determine what search results you should appear in, will be powered by "Evergreen Chromium". If you're wondering just what in the world that is, it's basically a fancy way of saying - now, Googlebot uses the the latest stable version of Chrome. So when a new feature is added to Chrome, say support for a new advanced functionality in Progressive Web Applications, Googlebot is able to use that feature and functionality right away. When it was announced, this change added over 1,000 new pieces of functionality to the Google web crawler.

This is just one of the adjustments and announcements I expect to see from Google this year that will all point to the same thing - provide an excellent user experience through a Progressive Web Application, and you will find your site performing well in Google's search results. First movers that deploy PWAs before their competition can expect to push past the competition and enjoy a nice lead while everyone else waits to catch up on PWAs in 2020 and beyond.

I love talking about the future of commerce on the web, and PWAs are a big part of that, so if you have any questions please don't hesitate to reach out and let's chat and build the future of the web together.