The business advantages of Progressive Web Apps

First, it is important to know that a PWA is not a specific technology or technique. But what is a PWA then? PWAs or Progressive Web Apps are web applications that adhere to a specific set of guidelines. A PWA is all about the end goal and not about the actual technique used. It is not a platform you install. A PWA is not just an app, you can see it more as optimization of your site with an app like behavior instead of just an app.

So why should you choose for a PWA? 

A PWA is only a PWA if it is built according to a set of guidelines. See those guidelines here. Those guidelines, in general, will provide a lot of advantages for your current business. It will make your business more secure, faster and the experience for the user will be much better. But there are more advantages. The biggest business advantages are as followed:

SEO ranking 

Thanks to a PWA your SEO ranking will be higher in search engines. Search engines like Google want to provide their users with the most optimal search results. In the end, most search engines make money when people use them again. Implementing a PWA is seen as a positive indicator, this makes that sites are ranked higher.

Higher conversion

A PWA will improve your conversion rate. Speed is a very important factor if you look at your conversion rate. When interactions (like changing a page) take longer than a second, users will wander off with their minds and therefore may leave your site. With the app like interactions of a PWA, you can react directly on any interaction of the user. If loading takes some time a transition can be started directly to keep the feeling fast. An example, the PWA implementation of AliExpress helped them to improve their conversion rate with 104%. Which shows a huge advantage of implementing a PWA. 

Personalization

A PWA can dynamically load relevant information while still keeping responsive. With this personalization can be done a lot more performant. With AI and hyper-personalization becoming more and more common this is a great tool to help you with this.

Web app

As said before, PWA’s are relevant for sites. But that doesn’t mean they can help you create a site that for a large portion can replace an app. Functionalities like a home page or app icon, offline functionality, notifications are all there. This all without the hassle of custom Android and or iOS development, app store certification, etc. A great example that this can work is Tinder. Although they still have a native app, they had more swipes, messages and other interaction on their Progressive Web App. And the web app was 10th the size of the native Android app and the PWA works on all platforms, not only in one app store. 

Facts & figures

Above a few great business facts & figures are already mentioned of companies who implemented a PWA. Even more, companies have published their advantages about what their PWA did for their business. See the following business figures to be ensured of the business advantages of a Progressive Web App:

• Trivago users that added the PWA to their home screen used the site a whopping 150% more.
• An advantage is that PWAs load fast. The PWA of Uber has a loading time of fewer than 2 seconds. This has a marked impact on search engine rankings as faster loading sites receive a ranking boost. 
• The PWA of the social media platform Twitter ensured a lot of advantages. Twitter noted a 65% increase in pages per session, a 75% increase in Tweets sent and a 20% decrease in bounce rate. 
• Beauty brand Lancôme also has some great figures from their new PWA. 65% of all users landing on their PWA are on iPhones. With their new PWA, Lancôme saw a 53% increase in session length and a 10% bounce rate decrease among iPhone users. Also, 8% of purchases were done from a push notification. 

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A lot of companies are already successfully using a PWA also two of our clients PostNL and Horticoop are happily using their Progressive Web Apps. See their successful cases here.