We live in an increasingly fast, dynamic, ever-changing world. The incremental innovations that have an impact on people follow one another, with an increasingly clear focus on:

  • performance, think of the increasingly powerful devices we use every day or the tasks that allow us to do more quickly;
  • experience, to eliminate any friction in the use of software/hardware;
  • intelligence, with algorithms that now work in a predictive perspective.

It is in this direction, focusing primarily on performance and User Experience for the end user, which goes the Progressive Web App (PWA) development, a solution that wants to combine the best of native apps and Web technology.

What are the Progressive Web App (PWA)?

A Progressive Web App (PWA) is an app that uses modern Web capabilities to offer users a very similar (if not better) experience to a native app.

Unlike traditional apps, progressive web apps are a hybrid between regular web pages and mobile applications. The term “progressive” refers to the fact that they introduce new features and, from the user experience’s point of view, they are initially perceived as normal websites but progressively behave more like mobile apps, among other things multiplatform.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are:

Reliable :

Fast loading and works offline

Fast :

Smooth Animations, jank free scrolling and seamless navigation even on flaky networks

Engaging :

Launched from home screen and can receive push notification

Why use PWA? The PWA benefits.

By integrating a PWA into your website, you enrich the latter with cool technologies and provide app-like experiences. This can boost your business significantly. Let’s go into more details and list some of the PWA benefits:

  • The cost of developing a PWA is lower than with native applications.
  • A progressive web app is also faster to build than a native app.
  • PWAs work for all users regardless of their browsers thanks to the progressive enhancement approach.
  • Progressive web apps can be easily added by users to the homescreen with no need to go to an app store.
  • They are responsive so they deliver smooth experiences across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
  • Features like push notifications are huge attention catchers able to significantly increase your user engagement.
  • PWA can work offline or on slow networks and load quickly thanks to the use of service worker scripts, which improves user experiences and expands your reach.
  • PWA is secure thanks to the use of HTTPS that prevents data manipulations.

What’s inside? The PWA components

Every progressive web application has three key components:

  1. The app shell stores the basic JavaScript, CSS, and HTML needed for your application UI and quickly serves it from the cache.
  2. The service workers are JavaScript files that run on the background of browsers and serve the response from the cache to offline users, and can be scripted to provide push notifications, etc.
  3. The web manifest is a manifest.json file that holds your app configuration (name, look, color, logos, etc.) and allows your users to add the app to their home screen.

Integration of PWA to your Website:

We’ll show you how to convert your existing website into a progressive web app. It’s fairly simple, just follow the below steps:

  1. Create an app manifest
  2. Add it to your base HTML template
  3. Create the service worker
  4. Serve the service worker on the root of the scope you used in the manifest
  5. Add a <script> block to your base HTML template to load the service worker
  6. Deploy your progressive web app
  7. Use your progressive web app!

For Android with Chrome, tap on the hamburger menu in the upper right-hand corner of the browser window and then tap "Add to Home screen.” This may prompt you for confirmation, then it will put the icon on your homescreen and you can launch, multitask or delete it like any other app. Unlike iOS, you cannot edit the starting URL or name of a progressive web app with Android.

After all of these steps, you will have a progressive web app. Any page or asset that users load will seamlessly be cached for future offline access.

Let our team help you with progressive web app

If you are interested in a fast, engaging, and secure PWA for your website, our development team is ready to assist you.

We will perform the smooth integration and configure your PWA to behave in accordance with all your requirements, including the creation of custom service worker scripts. In addition, we will take care of the technical requirements for the integration (update your PHP and switch your site to HTTPS if it hasn’t been yet).