Progressive Web Apps: Speed

One of the most important performance metrics for your website is speed. How fast does your website load for your visitors? Load speed will affect multiple areas - from search engine optimisation (SEO), paid advertising (PPC), social marketing through to user experience and direct impact on e-commerce sales. In July 2018 Google announced that page speed is a ranking factor in search results: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html

Slower websites will just naturally have a lower number of conversions compared to a faster site. And having an optimised journey is even more critical for users on mobile devices. A slow site will mean more people will just leave without buying anything because no one wants to sit there waiting for a website to load. Also for retailers with a longer conversion funnel, speed is even more important.

There are multiple factors that contribute to website load speed - hosting technology and setup, database, application layer code through to the front-end website and code. Progressive Web Apps allow us to build better, faster experiences for customers that visit our client websites using mobile devices. It is important to point out that the technology alone does not necessarily mean an increase to load speed, but if a PWA is built and optimised well it should deliver a lightning fast journey that delivers a substantial improvement to mobile conversion.