Progressive Web Apps have taken 2018 by storm. Over the past two years, a lot of major companies put their developers to work on PWAs to overhaul and improve their mobile experience. Now in the early months of this year, Progressive Web Apps have brought about major benefits and trackable results. PWAs are transforming the best practices and standards of the mobile web and native mobile applications. Businesses are using PWA’s to replace their current desktop website, their mobile website, their native mobile app, or all three of them! Read about these five well-known companies that are doing Progressive Web Apps right.
1. Forbes
Forbes, a global media company, turned to Progressive Web Apps for their new mobile experience in order to improve loading times for their readers. The previous Forbes site took about 3-12 seconds to load – keep in mind that 53% of visits to mobile sites are abandoned if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. The new site grounded in progressive web app technology is capable of loading in 0.8 seconds. As a result, Forbes saw a 43% increase in sessions and a 100% increase in engagement.
2. Flipkart
Flipkart, India’s biggest e-commerce site, adopted a mobile-only strategy in 2015. After shutting down their mobile site and focusing only on their native app, the company was not seeing the desired results. They decided to combine their web presence and native app into a PWA to allow their current and prospective customers to have instant access to their store.
Compared to their previous mobile presence, Flipkart has tripled time-on-site with their Progressive Web App. Users spend an average of 3.5 minutes on Flipkart Lite versus 70 seconds on the predecessor. In addition, the Flipkart PWA has three times lower data usage than it’s native predecessor, allowing users in areas of slower connectivity to visit the e-commerce site too. It has also generated a 40% higher re-engagement rate among first-time visitors and a 70% higher conversion rate due to the “Add to Homescreen” icon, because customers have instant access to Flipkart whenever they want.
3. Alibaba
Alibaba, the world’s largest B2B marketplace, serves suppliers and buyers in more than 200 countries. With this global customer base, they needed the most compelling bridge between the users of their native app and the mobile web. They wanted to deliver a great user experience for both first-time visitors (who often come through the mobile web) and repeat visitors (who often use the native app). Building a great mobile experience for both types of users is an indispensable part of Alibaba.com’s success.
Alibaba’s PWA strategy brought about a 76% increase in total conversions across browsers, along with 14% more monthly active users on iOS and 30% more on Android. The “Add To Homescreen” prompt lead to users re-engaging four times more often than other mobile users.
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4. The Weather Channel
The Weather Channel, the company behind Weather.com, has always looked to the latest technology to be the number one in weather reporting. Their main goal is to provide timely, accurate information when it matters most to their global audience. The Weather Company wanted to provide this same immediacy in markets where users don’t have the latest smartphones, reliable connectivity, or there is a significant cost for downloading an app.
The Weather PWA saw an 80% improvement in load time. But even more impressive is that the PWA is available in 62 languages and 178 countries. Progressive technology allowed them to be efficient by enabling support for over 60 languages using one code base.
5. The Washington Post
With nearly 55% of their traffic coming from mobile devices, The Washington Post knows that providing a great reading experience on mobile devices is critical to their long-term success. For this reason, The Post joined a group of publishers and technology companies to create the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, a new platform for publishing content that loads instantly anywhere across the mobile web.
This PWA platform allows The Post to publish over 1,000 articles a day, with average load times of 400 milliseconds – an 88% performance improvement over their traditional mobile website. They also saw a 63% increase in mobile search users who returned within 7 days, demonstrating that PWAs are great for retention as well.
And The List Goes On…
PWAs are a great solution for companies looking to combine their mobile web experience and their native app experience. It allows businesses to serve both types of users and hone in on discovery and retention. The main benefits PWAs have brought businesses are speed increases, improvements in re-engagement, and increased conversions. As the examples show, Progressive Web App technology is being applied across industries, including entertainment, media, retail, and travel. And the list of companies that use PWAs goes on: Twitter, Lancome, The Home Depot, Virgin America, Fandango to name another few.
The reason for PWA’s success lies in their power to improve the entire mobile experience. Customers come back for more because they are able to interact with the brand in a positive way. Consumers are driving the shift from desktop websites and native apps to Progressive Web Apps.