Everyone Is Talking About Progressive Web App. What Is It?
A lot of people have been talking about Progressive Web App technologies recently.
You may have asked yourself what it is and where it comes from, right?
A PWA or Progressive Web App is a new technological breakthrough that performs excellent abilities beyond your imagination.
With the rising need to shop online nowadays, more and more businesses resort to PWA methodology to improve their websites.
To help you get a better insight into PWAs, we will include detailed information relating to the definition, the price, and why it is becoming the top choice of many companies.
Let’s look at the article below to learn more about this technological trend.
What Is PWA?
The term stands for Progressive Website Application, which was coined and introduced by Google in 2015.
A PWA combines all the best features of a regular website and a native app. It delivers distinctive app-like feelings to users while they are browsing websites. Therefore, it is usually known as the best of both worlds in the technological field.
Examples Of PWAs
Major brands around the world have reinforced their mobile efforts and released PWAs. Some of the most famous examples of PWAs include those used by media companies, platforms for social news-sharing, travel services, and e-commerce stores.
Such prominent businesses that are launching their PWAs are Twitter, The Washington Post, Pinterest, Starbucks, just to name a few.
Wondering about how these firms have improved when incorporating PWAs? You may be surprised to see the results.
Starbucks has witnessed a two-fold increase in its daily active users, while Pinterest saw its revenue rate rise by 40%.
Fashion and clothing brands also have their conversion rate reached at least 150% and reduced page load.
Besides, all of these PWAs require a smaller amount of data storage, around 100 to 300 KB.
Other businesses, especially those in the eCommerce industry, should take these companies as leading examples.
How Is PWA Developed?
There are commonly two most popular PWA development approaches that are highly adaptable by almost all businesses. The first option is using PWA templates, and the second one is using custom PWA development services.
1. Ready-made PWA Templates
Using ready-made PWA templates allows business owners to convert a typical website design into a modern and multifunctional PWA in just a few days.
Besides every essential feature of PWA technologies, business owners can enjoy other highlighted advantages such as:
Multiple storefront designs: Merchants and business owners are provided with a broader selection of choices and pick their favorite one.
Customizable themes: According to business owners’ desires, PWA templates can be customized specifically. However, the business will usually need to pay a higher price to get their custom versions.
2. Custom PWA Development
This option is more sophisticated than the previous solution in terms of both functions and designs. PWA providers will develop a whole new PWA website from scratch. These websites can be made customized for specific businesses upon their demands.
Therefore, personalization is the most outstanding benefit a business can have when using a custom PWA development service. Companies can add any features or design style that they want into the PWAs.
What Are The Features Of PWA?
Since its first debut, PWA technology has been widely recognized for its innovative features that help enterprises strengthen their original websites by manifolds.
Have you ever been curious about why businesses can multiply conversion rates and customer engagement by using PWAs? Let’s take a look at these distinctive features:
1. Speedy Page Load
A regular website can often take longer than 5 seconds to load its page in the browser completely. Meanwhile, a progressive website app needs less than 3 seconds after the initial page load to completely display its content.
2. Strong Browser Compatibility
One of the most vital points of PWAs is that they are highly adaptive to a wide range of browsers. Standard web browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox support almost all PWA’s features. Therefore, PWAs can quickly get closer to a broader number of users.
3. Offline Mode
Users can still see previously loaded content when the network around is hardly detectable or even out of reach. In order to do this, the web app needs to cache data on the devices for later use.
4. Easy Update
From the users’ point of view, they don’t need to regularly check for and manually install the updated version because PWAs can do it on their own.
Business owners don’t need to update the code and submit it to the app store for approval like a native app. Instead, these businesses can update their Magento PWAs and release them anytime they like.
5. Shortcut On Home Screen
Regularly, users have to visit the app store to download an app for their mobile us, but when entering a PWA, users will see a pop-up on the window that says “add to home screen”. The PWA is automatically added and displayed on the user screen with an icon by clicking on it.
6. Push Notifications
Like a real native app, a progressive web app can send notifications to users to inform them of the latest news or updated content. Therefore, when integrating PWA, stores can easily send messages to users to let them know about product restock or seasonal sale-off.
These are just some of several special functions that PWAs can offer. It is undeniable that these features bridge the gap between websites and native apps by performing both of their functionalities in more advanced ways.
How Much Does PWA Development Cost?
Their costs can vary a lot with the cheapest one starting from 5,000 and the highest reaching up to $50,000. With different development approaches, the price ranges differently, too.
1. Using ready-made PWA themes ($5,000-10,000)
There are several PWA theme providers who offer their available templates free of charge. However, businesses often prefer custom versions with the price range of $5,000 to $10,000.
This option is highly suitable for many small and medium businesses whose budgets are not very large but still want to boost their website’s performance.
2. Using custom PWA development services ($10,000-50,000)
PWA development services deliver high performance and accessibility in order to create a seamless user experience for websites. When choosing this solution, businesses are expected to pay at least $10,000 to get their own personalized PWA’s design or functional abilities.
Depending on their budget amount, PWA development companies can provide them with a wide variety of options and recommendations until their demands are met. The more sophisticated the custom version is, the higher its price is.
Therefore, custom PWA storefront usually charges merchants a vast sum of money and time to develop. Only large enterprises or corporations who need uniqueness and professionalism should resort to this solution.
Why Is PWA Becoming The Optimal Choice For Businesses?
Like any other website development approach, the Progressive web app serves as a tool to help bring about the best experience for users and proficiency for business owners.
To dive deeper into its abilities, let’s get an overview of its outstanding benefits that exceed other technological approaches:
1. Low cost compared to native apps development
In order to build a native app, businesses need to pay at least around $15,000 for the most fundamental ones. A complex and unique app can even cost up to $100,000.
Meanwhile, PWA solutions are more affordable. If you are a small and medium business, using PWA templates, which only charge you $500 to $1,000, will be suitable. Custom PWA development services can take prominent entrepreneurs a bit higher with the minimum budget of $10,000.
2. Effective methods to increase sales & revenues
- Providing better experiences for users
Users worldwide now prefer to use mobile devices so that PWA can satisfy these users with its distinctive and convenient features with the mobile-first approach.
When users experience professional and pleasant services, they will be more excited when shopping and likely to buy the products.
Let’s take the luxury cosmetics brand Lancôme as an example. Its PWA allows customers to surf the web app, search for products and purchase them quickly and smoothly. With positive feedback from users, Lancôme has seen a noticeable growth in its annual revenue since 2016.
- Increasing SEO ranking
SEO is the golden key that leads to the success of many companies. Fortunately, PWA integration can support the website’s visibility on search engine ranking pages. Also, thanks to PWA’s lightning-speed page load and reduced bounce rates. The site’s ranking on Google will leverage.
Searchers have a tendency to click on the top results that appear on the first page. Therefore, with a high SEO ranking, websites can increase organic traffic and lead generation numbers, which affect online sales and even local foot traffic. As a result, the revenue of PWA websites can increase manifolds.
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Attracting potential customers
When having an impressive experience with the web app, customers might introduce it to other people. Therefore, businesses will welcome more influx of visitors to their websites. This is a highly effective word-of-mouth marketing strategy, which helps companies save millions of dollars on advertising yet reach a vast audience.
Eventually, the firm can reach a broader range of customers and targeted users; the chances are that its sales will increase notably.
The combination of these benefits has helped PWA prove its stance on the eCommerce market. It seems to be a repeated cycle because no business wants to fall behind the trend when PWA becomes famous. Therefore more and more firms want to adopt this technology, which in turn increases its worth.
Final Thoughts
The progressive web app is gradually prevailing over traditional website development methods in the eCommerce industry.
It is indeed considered the future of eCommerce development because of its application on different devices, the improved speed. And the ease that requires no installation or updates.
There is no doubt that PWA will be continuously enhanced and refined to adapt to every unique need of businesses.
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