Building a Fast Progressive Web Application (PWA) With Jamstack
Progressive Web Applications are great for when you want to move web-apps to mobile devices. Jamstack approach to PWA helped us get the best performance with low costs of build and great scalability.
Building a Fast Progressive Web Application (PWA) With Jamstack
Going with Jamstack PWA can help even more in terms of better performance with low costs of build and great scalability.
Ever since mobile and tablet internet usage exceeded desktop back in November 2016 mobile users have been in the focus of many businesses. With internet trends shifting to more app usage, businesses needed a way to bring that app-like user experience that sparks engagement to their websites as well.
The solution came with Progressive Web Apps. PWA approach changes how users interact with the website and with the brand for that matter, over mobile devices.
What are Progressive Web Apps?
Simply put PWAs are somewhere in between a website and an app. Instead of pushing users to download your app, PWAs allow you to bring that app-like experience to the website through the user’s web browser.
Why should websites use PWAs?
From a technical point with PWA being based on HTML downloaded from a typical WWW server, there is no hustle of adjusting it to a different phone and/or OS version.
Obviously, PWAs provide a mobile-app experience, which means you can play with users’ engagement much more by giving them more functionality. Load instantly and respond quickly to user interactions.
Not only that! You can also browse the content even when you are offline.
With PWA’s you are able to push notifications which can greatly increase the engagement of your audience.
Because it caches data, everything is incredibly fast. No worries about users leaving when waiting for content to load since there is no time to load.
Finally, thanks to all of the advantages mentioned above PWSs are reported to improve conversions by increasing potential reach with low acquisition costs.
Challenges of PWAs
Up until recently, cross-browser support was a problem. Today, progressive web apps are fully supported by Chrome and Opera. Firefox supports nearly all of PWA features. And Apple has finally started with limited support since Safari 11.1 for iOS. While this is a move in the right direction, there is still a lot of work to be done.
Other challenges? Well, cross-application Login support is still a problem in some cases. The appearance of a central download store for PWAs (like iTunes store or Google Play) could help trustworthiness a lot.