In the Magento community discussion, you must have heard a lot about an emerging term – Progressive Web Applications (PWA). As you can imagine, PWA are fast becoming standardized and Magento merchants can quickly start benefiting from this great new channel. Magento Progressive Web Application (or Magento Pwa for short) is a recent terminology created by Magento themselves. What this fundamentally means is that Magento PWA refers to stores that are built using Magento PWA Studio which utilizes the latest benefits from the progressive web app technology.

Ok, so what is Progressive Web App?

Well, think of it as a way to bring the native application appearance — along with many of the built-in features from native application such as push notifications and offline capabilities to the web, which in turn can increase conversion rates for stores that rely on the omnichannel shopping experience prefered by online users.

Benecos is a Magento PWA developed by SimiCart

Realizing the need for a multi-device shopping experience that requires the appearance and functionalities of a native mobile application for a seamless experience, Magento (and many other ecommerce platforms) is making it progressively easier for store owners to embrace the PWA movement with their release of PWA Studio. As a result, you might see these apps becoming an essential integration for every ecommerce store.

Diving into the Magento

Magento PWA Studio is a new and emerging open-source platform for Magento developers and merchants to build and maintain PWA versions of their online stores. The platform is easy, effortless and guaranteed to increase your PWA-building productivity, thanks to the community of Magento PWA enthusiasts to help you out.  “PWA Studio will provide developers and merchants with the tools they need to compete and deliver the convenience and utility of a mobile app combined with the searchability and buying experiences they get from their desktop experiences.”

• Jason Woosley, SVP of Product & Technology at Magento, an Adobe company

At its core, Magento PWA Studio is essentially a set of developer tools that facilitate the process building PWAs within the xMagento 2 framework. The main tools provided with Magento PWA Studio are:

• Pwa-buildpack: The main build and development tools necessary for development of Magento PWA
• Peregrine: A collection of useful custom React hooks and components for Magento PWA.
• UPWARD or Unified Progressive Web App Response Definition is an essential component that helps describe how a web server should deliver and support a PWA.
• Shared Magento server: Maintained by the Magento team and open to all Magento developers, this shared server helps developers jumpstart the storefront development.

In case it’s still not very clear to you, the following video below might help:

Magento PWA Studio

Benefits of Magento Progressive Web Apps

It turns out, there’s more to PWA than meets the eye. PWA offers a host of benefits that help elevate the ecommerce store to a whole new level.

Instant Load Time

PWAs are built with progressive enhancement as their core principle. This enables the app to load instantly on repeat visits, thanks to device-level cache. As a result, the volume of data required to respond to user actions is reduced significantly.

Installable

The PWA is generally added as an icon on the device home screen and the app can be launched with full-screen immersive experience and control over screen orientation. Provide some more and strong features.

One Codebase for All Versions

PWAs eliminate the need to develop a native application for each platform. This substantially reduces the overall development cost of your store while extending the reach of your application.

Better User Experience

With simple interface and functionality, PWA delivers improved experience thanks to minimum touch-points and streamlined flow.

Search Engine Optimization

PWAs can do wonders for stores trying to broaden their reach to the curious shopper in the habit of Googling products. Since PWAs are essentially web pages listing the best features of native applications, your store page can be optimized for search engines. This in turn can potentially drive more revenue for your store.

The Case Studies

The technical side of the story may be bland, but rest assured – Magento has its own archive of customer success stories with PWA.

Eleganza

One of the more recent Magento stores to switch to PWA is Eleganza, a high-end fashion retailer located in Netherland. To start off, the brand was already doing pretty well. But they felt that they could do better by embracing the latest performance-improvement practices from the industry, and by closing the gap between their native apps and their webstore. The result, as expected, was nothing short of outstanding:

• 76% increase in pages per session
• 23% faster average page load time
• 372% faster average server reaction time

Eleganza embraces PWA to deliver a seamless and responsive experience to all screen sizes.

It’s no coincidence that brands who went PWA often find increased revenue and engagements on every purchasing channel. Guus van der Staak, eCommerce manager at Eleganza, had something to say about these extraordinary results with PWA: “We look forward to realizing additional value in the future as PWA not only brings us to the forefront of our market but keeps us there for years to come.” Read more about How Eleganza Transformed Mobile Shopping with PWA Studio.

ROECKL

Like Eleganza, ROECKL is a bright example of a Magento 2 PWA which has had its functionality and performance revamped with Magento PWA Studio. After going PWA, the store’s purchasing experience was fundamentally transformed, with a greater focus on the mobile experience, while retaining the already well-performing desktop purchasing experience. The results attained with Magento 2 PWA, as reported by the brand: ROECKL saw an increase in order by 198%, 172% of which are from mobile devices. The responsive shopping experience—along with improved performance and instant load time—brought by Magento PWA was the main element that helpedROECKL see an average increase of users by 150% (and 175% mobile users), while their bounce rate saw a significant decrease by 35% (39.8% for users on mobile device). With these results, it’s sufficient to say that Magento 2 PWA was the right approach for these first Magento stores that have initiated the Magento PWA movement—a movement that can only get more popular from this point onwards. It is no doubt that brands are now rushing to implement PWA initiatives into their business, making a future where all stores are Magento 2 PWA not so far-fetched. To see more of Magento PWA examples, we recommend pwacart.com as a helpful catalogue of the currently available Magento PWA stores.

Conclusion

Could your storefront be missing out on all the essential experiences that the better-performing brands are offering? It’s quite possible, given that brands are now optimizing their storefronts for a mobile-first approach that aims to universalize typical shopping experience across all devices to be fast, engaging and seamless. As it currently is, Progressive Web App is set to no longer be a momentary movement, but a permanent shift in the way app-browsing experience is done. And among popular eCommerce development approaches, we feel Magento 2 PWA is the successor of the old and outdated shopping experience. For Magento store owners looking for a cost-effective solution for theirstore’s PWA development, SimiCart is a Google-recognized Magento PWA solution provider. With over 8 years of experience, it is ready to turn your storefront into an engaging PWA within a week of development time.  

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