And finally, one of the most important questions – for what format of online business will PWA technology be appropriate?
ONLINE STORES
PWA technology can be applied to large online stores, but it will be difficult to work with such a resource in offline mode. This is due to the fact that a large store requires a lot of requests to the server when filtering or sorting a large number of products by various criteria. In addition, a lot of photos of products that are undesirable to compress too much may simply not fit in the local cache storage. With stores that have a small product catalog, the situation will be better: their assortment can be displayed on one page and filtered using JavaScript on the browser/application side.
INFO RESOURCES
For such types of sites as a blog, information, corporate resource or service site, it will be easier to set up PWA. This is due not only to the fact that such sites usually have fewer images (compared to online stores), but also to the fact that they do not need to filter or sort content, and new pages appear relatively infrequently. The principle of operation of such an application will be similar to the Facebook feed described above: the background synchronization mechanism will find and download new content when the Internet connection appears.
LANDING PAGES
Finally, for a landing page or business card site, PWA is the easiest way to implement: due to the fact that the content of these resources is practically unchanged, you do not even need to set up background synchronization for them. The entire site will be cached on the device, and the user will be able to access it at any time.
Thus, in theory, PWA can be used for almost any site, but not for everyone it will be appropriate. The decision about the necessity of switching to PWA should be made based on the size of the site, its focus, as well as the goals and objectives of the online business.
Implementation of PWA technology on an existing website
To quickly implement PWA on a ready-made website, it must meet the following requirements
- optimized weight of all images and photos on the pages;
- minimized code of scripts, CSS styles and HTML files. It is highly desirable to use scripts only on pure JavaScript, without the use of third-party libraries;
- preparation of icons of different sizes for the main screen of different platforms (Android, iOS, Windows) on which the application will be launched;
- maximally optimized size of the entire site (due to the limitations of the memory occupied on the device specified above).
If your site does not meet the listed criteria, it does not mean that it is impossible to transfer it to PWA technology – it will just take more time and resources to implement.
It is worth noting that for sites on some popular CMS (for example, WordPress) there are plugins for transferring an existing resource to PWA. However, it is important to clarify that even when using plugins, it is necessary to check and test by specialists: the larger and more complex the site, the more errors and problems may arise during its automated transfer. The same can be said about the EscalatingWeb resource, which offers a fully automatic “conversion” of the site to PWA. Judging by user reviews, it is not suitable for everyone and works correctly only with small sites with a small amount of dynamic content.
Progressive Web App technology is one of the modern trends that can determine the future of the Internet and online business. This was emphasized, for example, by the founder of Moz Rand Fishkin in his forecast for 2018. The most important indicators for modern web resources are usability (UX) and cross-platform compatibility, and progressive web applications perfectly cope with these tasks. Yes, not everything is perfect yet – because the technology is quite new, but it is constantly evolving and expanding functionality, opening up new opportunities for users.