Benefits of Progressive Web Apps: Forbes, Flipkart and others taking the high road
By now you know what Progressive Web Apps are and how they are changing the future of apps.
Let’s have a look at how big brands like Forbes, Flipkart, etc. are using PWA to turn around their revenue.
OLA
OLA, an online transportation company, is the leading cab aggregator in India. It has expanded to a network of more than 6,00,000 vehicles.
OLA’s PWA has been able to increase the mobile traffic by 68% in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The numbers in Tier 3 has been quite impressive as it generates 30% more traffic than the native app. The most interesting fact is that, 20% of users who book using OLA PWA had previously uninstalled their native apps.
Result after PWA
Flipkart Lite
India’s largest e-commerce platform, Flipkart started with an app only strategy during its initial days. Soon they found it difficult to provide a user experience that was fast and responsive. Flipkart engineers came up with a solution that was not only fast but also helped them to increase user re-engagement.
Flipkart Lite combines the features of web and app to deliver a native app-like experience.
The statistics showed huge improvement
- The engagement rate was increased by 40%.
- 60% of all visits were generated by home screen.
- Customer conversion rate was increased by 70%.
A two tap process provides a faster user experience. User visits the website via URL and then selects ‘Add to Home Screen’ to install Flipkart Lite. With 63% of Flipkart Lite traffic coming from the 2g network, service workers reduce the load time and provide fast user experience. Flipkart Lite uses 3x less data when compared to the native app.
Results after PWA
Forbes
Forbes, a US business magazine company that publishes articles on marketing, industry, finance and other sectors developed their own Progressive Web App, a native app like experience to improve the mobile user experience.
More than 50% of the traffic coming from mobile, Forbes wanted to improve its mobile experience for the user and also wanted to increase its engagement rate. Forbes faced high bounce rates and low engagement rate because of the slow mobile site.
Forbes developed their own Progressive Web App, providing user functionality like push notification, offline support, and add to the home screen prompt.
Results after PWA launch
Twitter, a combination of online news and social networking service where a user interacts and posts using tweets. It has more than 300 million monthly active users. With most of the users using the service on mobile, delivering an enrich mobile user experience was always on the card. Twitter developed Twitter Lite to provide faster mobile web and robust experience. Twitter Lite combines web and native app feature to deliver high user engagement and to lower data consumption rate.
A two tap process helped Twitter to provide a fast user experience. User visits the website via URL and then selects add to home screen to convert to Twitter Lite.
Twitter has seen an enormous rise in daily traffic from Twitter Lite add to the home screen prompt. On an average, more than 2,00,000 unique launches have been noted by Twitter with a user making it to 4 times a day.
Result after PWA
Benefits of Progressive Web Apps
Some of the benefits of Progressive Web Apps are:
More Secure: Progressive Web Apps are operated through HTTPS servers, so they are more secure than native apps. HTTPS ensures encrypted communication between a browser and the websites.
Instant Page Loading: Caching is one of the strength of PWAs, which enables instantaneous page loads. With smart caching, content once get downloaded gets cached resulting in better response time.
Service Workers: In flaky networks, service workers deliver pre-cached content to a user. As a result, the user experience is not affected, and it creates an interactive session.
High User Engagement: Stats clearly shows with the advent of “Add to Home Screen” feature users now visit twice and also time spent per session also increased by 74% across all browsers.
Fast Loading: PWAs facilitate page loads within milliseconds with superfast user interactions; making them four times faster than their native counterparts.
Light Weight: The advance feature doesn’t affect the size of a Progressive Web Apps, these are lightly weighted apps.
These stats don’t lie. PWAs are revolutionizing businesses. Moreover, it won’t break your bank if you wanted a PWA for your website. You can also see this success by shaking hands with future of mobile apps, just like Flipkart and other brands.
Not only these giants but the others also have benefited from PWAs. Here are some of the other success stories to go through. Who knows the next one can be yours…
About Me
I’m a Digital Marketer at Widely, and I am super enthusiastic about PWAs. The journey of PWAs has just begun, and it has already started to make its space in the app domain. Companies have already started to invest in this new technology. It will be interesting to see whether PWAs will completely replace native apps or not?
Reach out to Widely to upgrade your website into Progressive Web App in minutes and to know more about it.
Thanks Anshuli Gupta for proof reading and co-authoring the article with me. Being somebody new into expressing my knowledge via write-ups, it was extremely useful.
