PWA benefits for Magento 2

To pay less and get more is a wild dream of any Magento store owner, and PWA can offer you this. By this time, we already know that native apps can be expensive to develop and maintain afterward, not to mention the difficult process of getting your app on the App Store.

The cost of developing and afterward supporting PWA for the Magento 2 website will be much lighter than a Magento 2 store plus a native app for iOS and Android since it’s a cross-platform product. For a native app you’ll have to develop and maintain two separate apps - one for Android users, another for iOS. If you are a huge Magento eCommerce owner - the process of development will be heavy in terms of time and costs.

Let's imagine that you have created an app that according to you is simply perfect, but there is a question that you can’t find an answer to. Why are people not using it? Downloading an app can be a lot of work for some people and it's easier to simply not do so. Besides, do you really know someone who would casually go on the App Store and search for an app to download just for fun?

Mobile users are growing, but there are people looking at your site from the browser. How to optimize for both? Use PWA for Magento 2. The look and feel for the mobile users will be app-like with all the functionality. What’s more, when visiting your store from a mobile browser, customers will get a pop-up notification to add the web app to their home screen. PWA can save a lot of time and increase client satisfaction.

PWA boosts businesses using it in almost every way, including SEO. Since PWA operates as an app and webpage at the same time, it can smoothly optimize for mobile to deliver an excellent experience, and the pages render extremely fast.

Everything mentioned above is about a better experience and that’s one of the main indicators for a better ranking in search engines. Accordingly, you are getting better ranking and greater visibility, which leads to more page visitors and sales.

This is perhaps one of the most special benefits of PWA. If you have a PWA website, your customer will be able to go through your store without an Internet connection. Meaning that they will be able to browse your store from anywhere, and such things as weak or no Internet connection won’t harm their experience with you.

Such a thing is possible thanks to a Service Worker who caches the information when the device is online thus the cached content can be retrieved while offline.

Thanks to the Service Worker mentioned before, the webpage can load amazingly fast. All the information is cached and displayed with or without the internet connection. The page will run smoothly, and most customers won’t even see the page loading.

With PWA you are doing a lot of favors to your customers, and this is another important point. Native apps require users to go to the App Store or Google Play to update the app. Who has time for that? With PWA, your customers are not troubled with notifications to update the app manually as no updates are needed for PWA same as it is when browsing websites.

The concept or PWA is relatively young, and it may be hard to find reliable partners to develop your PWA project. A lot of agencies and individual developers these days will try to sell you their services, before you make your decision, be sure that the agency or developer has proven expertise.

The opportunity to browse the store with weak or no internet connection is impressive, however, there is a catch. For now, only pages that you have visited while being online can be viewed without the internet connection. It is possible to cache objects and pages that you have not visited also but it requires custom development and may be time consuming. Also, full checkout while offline is not possible without an active internet connection by default.

This means that if you install a purchased Magento extension, it is most likely that they will not work fully since PWA is a separate storefront outside of Magento and Magento has limited capabilities of changing content on the front end. So extensions that change the front end will most likely not work on PWA websites.

Another reason why you should consult an agency that has already built a reputation. There are a lot of free and paid extensions that claim to add the PWA to your Magento 2 website. Extensions almost always are easy and it could be just a few hours to put a PWA extension that costs 200 USD and is not working. In reality, none of these extensions are able to bring full PWA experience to your customers - the only real feature is the notification to add the website to their home screen. Such things as offline mode and true PWA user experience are not included.

PWA for Magento 2 is a revolutionary solution that every Magento store owner should consider.

Interested in checking already finished websites with this solution? See Magento PWA examples page.