How PWA can help you in increasing conversion rates?

We are in the well-known years of Progressive Web Apps (PWA)s. PWA for Magento and Shopify has taken a flight. And why not? They are everywhere. With the massive potential for user engagement to websites with push notifications and A2HS functionality, offline access, and a seamless experience across browsers and devices, PWAs might be the best since sliced bread.

But perhaps one of the biggest reasons for the rapid adoption of PWAs is their potential to increase conversion rates. 

PWAs and conversion rate

Website speed and performance is a huge factor in getting visitors to convert.  You may have great content, products, and services, but if a visitor finds that the website takes too long to load, he/she will lose interest quickly.

How long is too long? 

There are a host of studies and algorithm analyses that show that anywhere between 2-4 second is considered a reasonable speed. Anything longer than 4 seconds is hit or miss.

Performance matters, and it impacts user retention and conversion as Google has noted. You can use Google’s Impact Calculator tool right now to see how your site performs on mobile. It also offers a report with custom suggestions to improve your site’s performance.

And if you want to understand the impact on businesses of all sizes, then behemoths like Amazon and Google can lose up to billions of dollars because of a single second of lag time.

Judging by the same standard, if an e-commerce site makes $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay means a loss of $2.5 million in a year.

But if speed, performance, and conversion are related, why is it so difficult for websites to implement speed?

Part of the problem lies with the proliferation of mobile devices and mobile browsing habits of users. 

There is a prevalent myth that users download apps very eagerly of every website they visit frequently. 

The Comscore Mobile App report states that over 50% of the US”s smartphone users don’t download a single app within a month. Users dislike the process of visiting app stores, downloading, and installing apps. 

While mobile may be edging out other devices where traffic is concerned, it poses a major challenge for retailers when it comes to conversion rates. 

1. Mobile is great for traffic but poor for conversion
2. Desktop still rules the roost when it comes to conversion.

This is why PWAs are immensely popular. They bridge this gap between desktop and mobile and provide the user with the best of both worlds.

PWAs have a wider reach – because they are the cross channel and work on all devices. Plus, PWAs are super easy to install..

Discoverability is not a problem. The user acquisition over the web is 10x times cheaper than native apps. PWAs eliminate friction and provide a seamless, end-to-end experience.

And this flawless user experience works over flaky internet networks or no internet at all, resulting in blazing fast experiences and successful conversion.  

Using PWAs retailers can offer better and faster ways to deliver customer experiences. Since PWAs load just like regular web pages but also provide native device functionality like offline access, push notifications, launching a camera, etc. it is a win-win.

The number one advantage of PWA over non-PWA sites is speed. This is because PWAs use technology that reduces the time it takes a user to complete important tasks like searching for a product, adding to cart or purchasing it.

Research shows that the faster a shopper can accomplish these tasks, the more likely she/he is to buy.

How does this impact SEO?

One question that many retailers who are exploring PWAs tend to ask is if Google’s algorithm takes PWA as a ranking factor when ranking indexed sites. The answer is that simply having a PWA won’t help you rank better. 

However, Google is pushing PWAs within the ecosystem because PWAs do provide websites with many valuable benefits that indirectly help their search rankings or SEO. 

For instance, the lightning fast speed and responsiveness provided by PWA after the initial page load is a massive benefit to websites that want to improve their SEO – because they are improving the overall user experience.

Better user experience and engagement are directly related to more people staying on the website, browsing more and shopping more.

How PWAs have helped these companies convert

Treebo built a PWA and saw a 4x increase in conversions year-on-year. For repeat users, the number was 3x and the median interactive time on mobile dropped to 1.5 seconds. 

The Best Western River North Hotel saw an astounding increase in revenue with their PWA – that of 300%.

For Trivago, a 150% rise in the number of people that added its new PWA to their home screen. 

Petlove saw a 2.8x increase in conversion and a 2.8x increase in time spent on the website. 

But perhaps one of the most quote examples is that of Pinterest. They rebuilt their mobile site as PWA, and their engagements increased by 60%. With a 44% increase in user-generated revenue and an increase in time spent on the website by 40%, it truly inspired many other brands to get on board with PWA.

For more PWA stories and stats, you can check out pwastats.com.

But it is not just eCommerce giants and retailers who are cashing in on these conversions. Want more visitors to your blog? Or want more readers on your news portal. Whatever your requirement, PWAs can get those numbers up.

Earlier this year, Magento announced the availability of PWA Studio. It is basically a set of tools that enable retailers to build online stores with app-like experiences. Thereby solving the mobile conversion dilemma and delivering highly personalized shopping experiences across devices and channels.

Recently Apple shipped iOS version with service workers’ support. Don’t be surprised, as iOS has already gotten into the progressive web app space.

This is why everyone from Apple to Microsoft to Magento is finding ways to be more PWA friendly and make the most of its performance and engagement benefits.

Learn everything about: What is Magento PWA?

How PWA Affects Revenue and Marketing Operations

1. Mobile-first approach

• Average Americans spend 5.4 hours every day on their phones— mostly for social engagement, entertainment, and business purposes.
• 62% of users with negative mobile-store experience are less likely to purchase from the same store.
• With social media capturing the biggest sales pie among all other sales channels on mobile touch-points and users demanding better mobile-experience— you should consider building mobile-friendly digital experiences. Mobile-first approach will help improve SMM conversions.
• Shopify PWA helps build mobile-first websites that provide faster and better shopping-experience, increase conversions, and prune down customer retention costs.
• Additionally, PWA features such as ‘push notifications’ and ‘add a shortcut to homescreen’ can retain customers and cut down the price on retention marketing.

2. Lightning-fast store

• 53% of customers abandon websites if the pages take more than 3 seconds to load.
• But speeding up websites with visually-arresting & intuitive experience improves core KPIs of the store. Better website performance decreases bounce rates, leads to more page views, shrinks cart abandonment rates, and converts more visitors.
• Increased speed also adds valuable aspects in user-brand interaction and builds a positive brand image.
• Brand credibility pushes customer loyalty to the brink, henceforth, reducing customer acquisition and retention costs.
• Enhanced load speed also plays a key web performance metric gimmick in improving the SEO of the store.
• Better web performance will hand-over room for more extensions that were dampening your Shopify 1 and Shopify 2.0 store earlier.

3. Reliable Performance

• Shopify stores function when you’re connected with the internet. But they choke up under flaky or bad networks.
• On the other hand, your Shopify with Headless front-end just needs to load once, and they are good to show-up even when the network crumbles or goes down! The offline-accessibility brings utilitarianism on the table for multiple use cases.
• Lazy-loading PWAs work well in regions with unstable internet connections. You can use the feature to venture into a new market, expand your reach, and have a first-mover advantage over close rivals.

4. Low data consumption

• PWAs use smart caching techniques. Smart cachers reduce data transfer, lower load on your server, and save bills with optimized server activities.
• Low data consumption facilitates users with more data to browse.

5. Cross-device compatibility

• Building and managing a traditional web store, developing apps on native android & iOS environments, and creating tablet-friendly stores can be daunting. Headless Shopify gives you the power to do all of that at one stroke.
• It gives users the feel of using an app-like interface and other app features and is also accessible on the web.
• It reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Time-to-Market. A unified update will save you from making updates on all platforms, individually.

6. Seamless 3rd party integrations

• The conventional systems with different code bases face a hard time in integration.
• But headless commerce plays nice with all the third-party integrated services. It uses powerful APIs to integrate all your subsisting systems (ERP, PIM, IMS, etc.) and build tangible shopping experiences using your preferred programming language.
• It makes your store future-ready and adapts to the seismic technical shifts.

Marketing benefits of Headless Architecture:

• SEO: Apart from page load speeds, session durations, page views, and Google-favoring stores— PWA gives us enormous control over-optimizing the front-end.
• SMM: Most niches of eCommerce social media marketing drive revenue and are directly proportional to sales.
  • While improved speed will anyway increase SMM conversions,
  • The rapid landing and web page development will allow marketing teams to iterate fast and make immersive content marketing campaigns.
• A/B Testing: As the back-ends of Shopify landing pages are tightly-coupled with the front-end— A/B testing brings severe pain for developers and testers. With Shopify PWA— landing pages are easily built, rapidly deployed and tested, and are always kept on bug-check.
• The lack of dependency between the front-end and the back-end separates the reliance of content marketers on developers & vice-versa. The right person gets the proper strength in their domain. Both enjoy privileges to express themselves.
• As the front-end is built using PWA— the blazing-fast store will decrease the bounce rate.
• The fast load speed indirectly helps in paid campaigns (PPC), where your spending amount is dependent on the quality score, and page load speed is one of the three key quality score factors.

In a nutshell

PWAs have immense potential to increase conversion rates because they use technology that brings the website to every device at a lightning-fast speed, at a low cost and work flawlessly across channels. But then, you can never ignore conversion rate optimization. Despite all the PWA benefits, it’s always advisable to do have a CRO team.. They solve the mobile conversion dilemma and the desktop responsiveness challenge by bridging the divide.

Related Post:

To have detailed knowledge on how SEO works for progressive web apps. You can read SEO for PWA. In this post you will learn how pwa works, Indexing PWA and making it discoverable, guidelines and checklists, FAQs and Myths, JavaScript Rendering, and a lot more. So do read that post as well.