WHAT ARE PWAs?

Im sure you have certainly heard about PWA (Progressive Web Apps), but you may not know what they are. Let me try to shed some light on this technology from our experiences at Making Science. In a web world in which the majority of browsing traffic is consumed on mobile phones, having our website adapted to any device and most importantly a mobile device is a competitive advantage in the market. A Progressive Web App is nothing more than a website that through technology can behave like a native app on mobile devices. Since this allows you to have access to all the functionalities of the different mobile devices (camera, microphone, geolocation, phone orientation, etc.) just like a native app would. With the PWA it is possible to unify the best of the app world and the best of a web page world. How does it work? The PWA consist of three key elements that are: Manifest, Service Workers and Responsive.

• Manifest: this code will allow the installation of the PWA on the desktop of a device.
• Service Workers: is a script that runs in the background that will allow the app to be cached when it is loaded the first time. Thus, in the next visits, we can access the content without connection. It also supports push notifications.
• Responsive: The responsive development of the site allows this to be displayed correctly on any device. Additionally, the APIs for Geolocation and Media allows access PWB to access the location, microphone and camera of the device.

So what advantages does a PWA have over a native App?

• The main advantage is that it is not necessary to develop a new platform to efficiently reach your mobile market, with just an incremental introduction of PWA technology you will have a very effective to reach to your mobile audience.
• The installation process is very simple and does not require an app market for users to access the PWA.
• Finding the PWS is very simple since it is done from the search engine of our browser.
• Allows the sending of push notifications.
• Updates are made automatically.
• It can be accessed without a data connection, “offline mode”.
• The loading is done almost instantaneously.
• It does not suppose consume additional memory beyond normal browser usage.
• Its development is cheaper than that of a Native App.
• Allows sharing the web content by sending url, something that an app does not allow.

Thanks to all the advantages we have described, developing your website as a PWA will lead to an increase in the loyalty and conversion rate of users on your website. All via an optimized user experience!

Discover AMP and how AMP can improve your website results

The appearance of mobile devices and the increase of their use has made us rethink the way in which we create websites. The focus on technologies and content have evolved dramatically in recent years. How many times have we got one of those websites that take so long to load? And those that do not stop showing popups and advertising messages that we can close or eliminate (if we can)? Until recently Google had decided to continue pushing the “mobile car” back, but in 2015 Google began showing their support for a new budding opensource technology that eventually became what we know today as AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages; in short, pages focused on mobile with fast loading. The AMP pages render the content much faster than a normal page: images, videos, advertising, etc., from 15% to 85%, and also help to reduce the cost of data on our mobile. With this new language, Google has also managed to improve the user experience by “forcing” developers to remove part of the heavy code from the page and define what can or can not be included for mobile and in what form, which is perhaps the most important advancement. In this way, AMPs pages are usually more affordable and usable by mobile devices.  

The foundations of AMP are based on 3 principles: Labeling of own HTML, with restrictions as we have commented to ensure a better performance. Java Script (JS) Library  that guarantees the fast rendering of the pages. And the optional Google cache nodes, keeping the content closer to the consuming users. The speed and cleanliness of the website code are the key points of the AMP improvements:

• Reduce CPC: AMP pages are favored over others in indexer results, so ads have a better ranking in online campaigns.
• SEO improvement: the speed of loading makes the organic classification of the web better.
• Increase CTR: the speed also, improves key indicators of a site such as bounce rate.

We should clarify that although the AMP  technology initially was thought for mobile, you can also develop AMP for desktop and as an example take a look at next page from BMW. As a note of confirmation, Google is implementing AMP little by little in all its services, so we can be confident that this technology will be dominant in web sites accessible to mobiles in the near future. You can see all the requirements and possibilities offered by AMP in the following link.