What is Magento PWA?

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IdeaInYou
  • Date Published
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  • Reading Time 4-Minute Read

PWA is constantly becoming more popular for online stores. Why? In this article, we are going to reveal the main reasons.

What is Magento PWA?

Progressive Web Application (PWA) was firstly mentioned by Google in 2015. PWA is a website that looks and feels like an app on a mobile device. It provides features like notifications and offline use.

This was the starting point when Magento 2 started to acquire features of the Progressive Web Application platform. Magento has introduced the PWA studio tools that are used to develop and sustain a PWA storefront on top of Magento 2.

Why is Magento PWA studio so important?

Basically, Magento PWA studio is going to be the next great improvement for the mobile web. PWA allows the creation of an app icon on a device so separate websites and apps can be avoided. Even though PWA demonstrates profits from mobile user experience, it is still a website.

The original app adds duplication of development effort across platforms – websites and apps. Unfortunately, a business may experience harsh times attracting new users and also keeping them. Sometimes even those who invest thousands of dollars might undergo this. There also can be another hindrance: mobile apps and responsive web don’t convert. Eventually, must look for new solutions to cope with such obstacles.

This is the point where Magento PWA studio comes to help. PWA is better than the common webshops and you can build PWA on top of Magento 2 with all the benefits it provides:

  • Load time is really fast which is crucial for your online store ( 53% of visits are abandoned if the load time takes more than 2 seconds).
  • Availability despite network conditions.
  • Offline mode.

Who does Magento PWA Studio influence?

It is beneficial for customers as well as for developers. Substantially, PWA studio makes customers’ shopping experience more rapid and effortless. Having added the website to the home screen, a website can simply be used as an app. You can also return to the website through the browser. One still can find a website through search engines.

For developers, PWA is a brand new frontend system where you can build PWA on top of Magento and control all your channels through a single code base, one deployment, and app. It will include “Venia” – a new PWA optimized reference theme.

PWA Studio uses actual browser features such as service workers and a web app manifest. The service worker is a script that works in the background that is responsible for pulling in notifications, cache material, and storing data. A web app manifest is the main place that stores meta-information about your store. GraphQL is also crucial for PWA Studio which is part of the development version of Magento 2.3. Except for already existing features, PWA Studio provides new features like push notifications, full-screen mode, offline mode, secure payments, etc.

Magento PWA Studio is now available for everybody. It allows decoupling of the frontend from the Magento 2 backend. It provides the set of tools that helps front-end developers to create PWA themes for Magento 2.

How to start using Magento PWA Studio

To learn how to start using this technology and get acquainted with the details you can here.

You can work with PWA studio documentation that will show you technical guidance, tools, techniques, and components to build better-working PWA frontends, it is a good place to start.

Conclusion

Hence, PWA is absolutely the right choice for building app-like stores. It’s a great improvement for the mobile web.  It needs less effort in developing than a common standalone shop. Both the customers and developers have a profit using it. PWA Studio is a perfect frontend system to build PWA on top of Magento. It’s definitely worth trying.