PWAs are a slam dunk

28th April 2022

There are a few websites you visit these days that are PWAs or Progressive Web Apps. THis means that instead of reloading the whole page every time someone performs an action, it reloads only those parts of the page that need to change. As an example, if you click from a home page to a product page, the header and footer can stay the same.

The speed increase of a well coded PWA over a normal website is impressive. Not just because they only reload the part of the page needed, but because they don't have all the overhead of making the browser do a full page refresh and repaint: it's what PWA's don't do that's more important for speed than what they do.

In general a PWA results in at least a 10% increase in conversion rate due to this speed increase. This has been seen multiple times and of course coupled with a redesign would result in even better conversions. For a site making £50 million ecommerce revenue a year, that's a £5million return within a year. So even if the PWA project costs half a million the ROI is phenomenal. There are very few ecommerce projects right now that can match this for bang for buck.

Yet, I see hesitancy to invest. There still needs to be further technical education of boards and senior execs to see the sense in these kinds of investments. It is harder to explain than physical retail expansion or investment in people or range expansion or other similar topics. There are so many brands leaving so much money on the table. Their competitors will soon start to eat their share by offering a superior PWA experience.

A nice PWA that has massive speed? Dunelm.com (no affiliation to me, just like it)

Back to article list