PWA, the untold story impacting your conversion

PWA conclusion

That's quite a lot to digest, giving you some CSR and PWA insights from the field, to be informed in time for your next case! Time to wrap it up:

PWA Take-aways

• PWA doesn't mean your shop will be fast because the end product has been labeled PWA;
• By not measuring correctly, it might make you blind for conversion losses;
• Choose the right rendering strategy and apply tree-shaking and code-splitting;
• Testing and maintaining (technical) SEO and different devices will require another (build) strategy;
• You might have to re-educate your employees.

Obviously, it is possible non of these apply. For example, there are PWA suppliers of e-commerce agencies (using PWA) out there who are doing a great job in building performant Progressive Web Apps, maybe doing partial hydration towards optimal user engagement via fast First Meaningful Paint. However, as I pointed out using some use-cases, most cases can still be seen as experimental or incomplete.

Should we stop building PWA?

A PWA might not solve your performance and UX issues as much as you like. Please don't let this be the reason to stop considering, investigating or building PWA's. Because:

• Although, -looking at the Gartner Hype Cycle- PWA might only be in the phase of "Innovation Trigger", I expect great things of the (combination of) features that makes a PWA a PWA and it is only a matter of time before we are used to the offline availability of web apps;
• Meanwhile, choose PWA for the right reasons, don't let performance, accessibility or mobile first be one of them;
• The Progressive Web App ecosystem is causing positive side-effects, such as awareness on (lack of) fast loading times and optimal user experience;
• Individual features of PWA could help address UX and loading times, if done correctly. Headless solutions is another positive side-effect, already done by Shopware, being SSR and thus a traditional solution without the overhead (in its broadest sense) that PWA might introduce;
• Set up performance budgets and accessibility audits;
• Received a quotation? Double your financial budgets as there are quite some topics that may still need attention after launch and even agencies are unaware of.

It isn't too late

Yet again, it the end there are already agencies building fast and even accessible PWA solutions. Not ready for PWA yet? When it comes to UX and conversion, it is never too late to start optimizing your current shop to not only have high user engagement on first visit, but keeping your shop fast on successive page-visits.