Centmin Mod site & forum Progressive Web App (PWA) Conversion
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I am a self confessed page speed optimisation addict so when I started reading up on Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and using service worker caching and precaching, I got all excited by the possibilities of making my sites and forums load pages even faster :)
On July 22, 2018 I started reading up on PWA and service workers doing simple test static HTML pages. I tried various methods, libraries and frameworks for service workers and settled on using Google Workbox.
Then once I had a basic handle on them, I started converting my centminmod.com site over to PWA. The site is a good candidate for testing as it’s purely static HTML based.
Page load speed wise, the performance gains have been awesome according to Google Data Studio / Google Analytic page speed metrics.
- July 24th — PWA switch
- July 25th — disabled Google Adsense page level ads
- July 26th — a lot of webpagetest runs and re-tuning of centminmod.com site for page speed including adding some pre-caching to PWA service worker.
Now I am working on converting Centmin Mod community forums over to PWA support as well
Great thing about doing the forum PWA conversion is finer grain control over which visitors/members get to experience the PWA version. I’ve setup a custom Xenforo usergroup which has the PWA enabled version of the forums configured so can test privately and selecting add forum members to the usergroup. Thus excluding general visitors/members from PWA enabled version for now.
Update: forum users can now selectively enable PWA mode for forums via User Preference Options
