If you are one of our growing army of online fans who enjoy reading our entertaining and informative articles on all things online, look away now.

Spoiler Alert!

The short answer is: “A PWA is the way.”

A traditional website can never compete with the versatility and array of features boasted by a Progressive Web App (PWA) to continually re-engage users.

Caveat

Although, we are looking at this from the point of view of business websites and sites for organisations such as charities, campaign groups, etc., which have a message to promote and reinforce.

For personal websites, with a limited and reliable audience, say family and a few close friends, a modest traditional website might suffice nicely to share family snaps.

But if you’re looking to stand out from the crowd, boost your brand, get your message across, highlight promotions as they drop, and keep your business in the forefront of users’ minds, a PWA is the way.

SEO

There’s no point having a great business offering on a fantastic website if nobody can find it among the forest of 2 billion sites on the Web today. It’s a waste of hard-earned money as well as time and effort.

How do you get found? Last year we published an article on SEO fundamentals. In it, we described off-page and on-page SEO, content marketing, bounce rate, security, even graphics: all good, fundamental rules to curry favour with the ultimate arbiter of website promotion, Google. Today, we add PWA to the top of the list for SEO.

A PWA has all the advantages of an app, but it is indexed by Google as a website, has a URL and can be found via search engines.

Many of the features that make PWAs great also boost SEO.

Load Time & Connectivity

PWAs are frictionless: they load as quick as an app, regardless of whether there is an internet connection or not. This improves the user experience (UX) and helps ensure users return to visit the PWA again. Google notices this. Repeat visits prove good UX, so it promotes your PWA in search engine result pages (SERP).

Shareable

As it is a website, the experience is easy to share. Just send or post the URL and others browse and download it. Google notices that the PWA is popular and automatically promotes it in SERP.

Smooth and Responsive

PWAs behave like native apps. Graphics load up quickly, everything responds smoothly. All great UX that your competitor’s lousy website doesn’t offer. Again, UX = repeat visits, = Google brownie points.

Push Notifications

Mean you can nudge your users at any time to return to your site, to push your latest promotion, share the latest news or whatever. PWA technology means you can do this even if your user doesn’t have the PWA open on their device or even if they’re not browsing the Internet. Repeat visits means brownie points from Google – see above.

Security

PWAs always connect via https, meaning your and your customers’ data are always safe. Google always rewards https sites over http: another SEO win!

Home Screen Icon

PWAs have a launch button, identical to the icon for an app, that opens the URL. If you’re on the home screen, you’re always in the forefront of your customers’ minds. Make it really easy for your users to open your PWA and they will. This increases repeat visits and voila: more recognition from Google, meaning better SEO.

Over and above what Google sees and rewards, there are also clear advantages for the user.

Frictionless Installation and Updates

Getting that Home Screen icon on your users’ devices is a simple, one-click process – more frictionless interaction. We all love that, including your customers.

But What About You?

A PWA is platform-agnostic. Just one version of your PWA that runs on any platform or operating system and every device slashes development AND update costs, along with saving time spent on the website that you could spend on your business – or just on the couch. Downtime is good for humans.

So, what was the question?