The benefits of PWAs for businesses

Progressive web apps improve user retention, engagement, and UX. These characteristics improve an app’s usability and, as a result, lead to the company’s success.

Let’s discuss how PWAs help businesses achieve these benefits.

Increased pages per session

PWAs increase pages per session, a web analytics metric that indicates how many pages a visitor views on average during a single visit (session) to a website.

Twitter—a popular microblogging social network—developed Twitter Lite (a PWA) to provide users with a faster and more engaging mobile web experience. Twitter Lite resulted in 65% more pages per session and a 75% increase in Tweets sent.

Reduced bounce rate

PWAs reduce the bounce rate, which is another metric used in web traffic analysis that represents the percentage of visitors that leave (bounce) the webpage without performing any action.

Using Twitter Lite, Twitter also saw a 20% drop in bounce rate.

Organic traffic

PWAs increase organic traffic, which refers to visitors that visit a website through unpaid sources such as a search engine’s organic results rather than paid advertisements.

After moving to a progressive web app model, Nikkei, one of Japan’s most authoritative media businesses, observed 2.3 times more organic traffic, 58% more subscriptions, and 49% more daily active users.

Return visits

PWAs increase the number of returning visitors—users who visit a website repeatedly from the same device. This metric helps to see how effectively a website retains the online audience.

After switching from a platform-specific desktop experience to a progressive web app, Hulu, a video streaming service in the USA, observed 27% more repeat visitors.

Less resource intensive

PWAs can work on devices with low memory and less processing power to alleviate the concerns of app users regarding data usage and memory consumption. This increases the accessibility of PWAs across various devices used by the users.

For example, Twitter Lite is more data efficient by default, serving smaller media resources and relying on cached data as much as possible.

Native app-like experience

Progressive web apps contain features that make them feel like native apps by providing access from the home screen, push notifications, background syncing, etc.

To provide a native app–like experience, BookMyShow, India’s largest ticketing firm, uses the add-to-home-screen feature.

Optimized speed

PWAs are optimized for faster speed. According to research, 40% of the users don’t wait more than three seconds for a web page to load. Slow loading increases bounce rates.

For instance, BookMyShow’s PWA is optimized for speed. It takes less than 2.94 seconds to load and enables checkout within 30 seconds.

Small app size

PWAs are small-sized apps that result in faster downloads and reduced memory consumption. A smaller size provides users with benefits like data consumption savings.

Twitter Lite, for example, is only 600KB compared to the 23.5MB of downloaded data needed to install the native Android app.

Note: In case you’re interested in knowing more about the business aspect of PWAs, check the case studies on web.dev.

Before PWAs, companies had to rely on native apps to provide a better user experience. However, there’s been growing support for progressive web apps in recent years because they combine the functionality of a native app with the accessibility of a website.