The Future of Your Mobile Site Is Progressive Web AMP (PWA + AMP)

Progressive Web AMP: Faster, Lightweight and Personalized 

Mobile devices are an extension of our lives; information search, purchasing, social sharing, navigation, and communication. Today, people use their mobile devices for just about everything they do, from shopping to hotel booking to travel planning. The revolution in mobile usage has given rise to some important user behavior changes:

1. In 2019, mobile is expected to surpass TV as the medium attracting the most minutes in the US¹
2. Half of app-time occurs in an individual’s top app, and 90% in the top five ¹
3. Google drives 96% of mobile search traffic, followed by Yahoo at 2% and Bing at 1%. Google Search is one of the most popular mobile apps in the United States ³
4. 78% of mobile searches for local business information result in a purchase. That’s higher than from any other kind of device ³
5. The probability of bounce reaches 90% when a page load time goes from 1 to 5 seconds ²

Speed Matters

When it comes to mobile pages, speed and UX matter; the faster and more optimized the better. Digital Marketers must keep people engaged on mobile by building quality mobile-first experiences. Although this might seem like a challenge for someone without a lot of web development expertise, there’s plenty of easy strategies you can implement to get started. Simply compressing images and text can be a game changer—25% of pages could save more than 250KB and 10% can save more than 1MB just through compression. Google’s analysis shows that the retail, travel, and healthcare sectors have the most room for improvement²

AMP – the best way to deliver mobile experiences

In our previous blog, we highlighted why Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are the best way to deliver content: lightning-fast load times, improved search results (SERPs) and mobile-first indexing from the AMP label that appears in search results.

End users are no longer willing to wait for slow pages to load and will abandon your site if the content is not served quickly. AMP pages render 15% to 85% faster than traditional HTML versions, leading to a rich consumer experience, better engagement, and conversion. Studies have shown that even a one second delay in page response results in 7% fewer conversions.

• AMP offers lightning-fast load times
• Amplifies mobile-first indexing and algorithm
• Reduces bounce rates and drives engagement

Progressive Web Apps

With most web traffic coming from mobile, the ideal solution is to marry the ease of discovery of search, with the high usage of the native app experience. Progressive Web App (PWA) is the answer, giving users a native app-like experience and downloadable content. PWA makes mobile experiences engaging and supports commercial monetization opportunities for businesses. With PWA, users can fully access previously visited pages while offline. Businesses can also send intent-driven notifications and marketing messages to encourage consumer action by leveraging Progressive Web App technology.

Combining a mobile first design philosophy with PWA technology has the potential to deliver a real world near “app-like” experience that will make e-commerce on mobile websites seamless. We are headed in a direction where user experience will help drive revenue for a business:

• Benefits of a native app with notifications + the discoverability of a website
• UX focused home-screen icon to serve repeat business opportunities
• Auto-fill & payments will be remarkably easy

Progressive Web AMP (PWA + AMP)⁴

While PWA provides significant benefits in interactivity and portability, there are drawbacks. Mainly, the first touch can be slow – since users have to access hosted content. As we saw earlier, because milliseconds matter on mobile, a slow start means user abandonment before PWA even has a chance to provide a benefit. Even when a user leverages a locally cached site through PWA, having to update some content can cause occasional slowness of the experience as the mobile device connects to the web to update parts of content. This inconsistent experience can lower consumer satisfaction.

AMP pages are ultra-portable, embeddable content units that load instantly. AMPs are pre-fetched and pre-rendered, guaranteeing that a user’s first touch is quick. AMP helps to deliver fast-loading pages with ease, boosting the mobile experience. The ideal solution combines the high-speed and online nature of AMP pages with the downloadability and interactivity of PWA.

Putting it all together

PWA + AMP offers an enhanced way of experiencing the web without the need for creating and installing a WebApp:

• Your website is now your mobile app and pre-rendered pages load instantly to user interaction
• Customers browse offline, keeping you connected each step of the way
• Users add app-icon to home screen for easy re-entry and repeat business
• Payment request eliminates tedious forms for easy checkout; Predict user’s next click to prevent lags or jerky transitions
• Send out push notifications to create monetization opportunities

If you want to learn more about AMP, PWA or PWA + AMP and how you can leverage these technologies, contact Milestone at sales@milestoneinternet.com.

Sources:

1. https://www.emarketer.com/content/mobile-time-spent-2018
2. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/
3. https://www.biznessapps.com/blog/2018-mobile-marketing-report-stats-need-know/
4. https://www.wompmobile.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-progressive-web-apps-for-e-commerce