How to Make a Progressive Web App From Your Existing Website?

  • By Garry Smith
  • 04-04-2022
  • Web Apps
pwa service

Progressive web apps are the perfect combination of websites and native apps. They offer numerous advantages to entrepreneurs and have emerged as the cost-effective way to succeed in a competitive business environment. Hence, entrepreneurs are looking for ways to convert their websites into progressive web apps. PWAs are more beneficial than websites in terms of user experience, flexibility, and ease of use. In this blog we will check out the process of converting a website to PWA along with PWA benefits.

Benefits of PWA Development for Businesses

Enhanced Performance
A progressive web app can function like a website, cache, and serve content such as text, images, and other elements efficiently, thus improving its performance. PWA enhances user experience, improves retention rates, and boosts customer loyalty by strengthening page-load speed.

More Efficient Security
PWAs utilize HTTPS to handle and maintain data securely, avoiding risks of snooping, security breaches, content tampering, and other unethical activities.

Native App Like Performance
A PWA looks and feels like a native app and performs like a website. Their design and settings are very similar to those of native mobile/desktop apps. Irrespective of the technologies, frameworks, and tools on which PWAs are developed, they offer the same user experience as native mobile/desktop apps do, and it is considered to be excellent when compared with sites.

Quick and Simple to Install
Any device can install PWAs directly through the web browser. Due to this feature, the abandonment rate will be quite lower, with a considerably improved advantage in terms of user experience. The installed app remains on the home screen on both desktop and mobile devices and can be easily accessed from there. Users find the app credible, flexible, and reliable due to its simplified access. Users can conveniently download a PWA quickly and directly from their devices without involving the process of downloading from the app store.

We have understood how Progressive Web Apps can help you enhance your customer experience and ROI. Here we will discuss two approaches to converting a website into PWAs. The first one is the manual method, and the second is with the help of the Progressive Web App development company. Let's begin with the process.

Manual Method

Creation of required folders
The first step is to create all the folders required for a basic web app. It includes the images folder, index.html file, manifest.json, and the service workers file such as sw.js.

Build an app manifest
App manifests are JSON files containing the following information.
The website's canonical name
A shorter version of that name (for icons)
Websites for OS integration
Color of website's background for OS integration
Beginning URL that new instances of the PWA will implicitly load
Description in human-readable form
Orientation restrictions (it is inappropriate to transform this from "any" without a hard technical limit)
Any icons for your website to be used on the home screen (see the above manifest generator for auto-generating icons)
This information will be utilized as the operating system metadata for your progressive web app when it is installed.
 
Create the service Worker
A PWA can cache its content using the fetch event with service workers while the user browses. This quickens the loading time of offline content. Rather than automate background sync, we focus on offline caching features of service workers today.
 
Choose a PWA Development Service Provider

If you lack technical skills and expertise, then the best option is to take assistance from a PWA development company. They possess the skills and experience to help you make the conversion process easier and more efficient. With a PWA development company, you can receive various benefits, let’s understand them one by one.

Relevant Experience
PWA development company will have years of experience and expertise in developing PWA’s. Therefore, they know how to develop fast loading, engaging and reliable PWA’s which will help you to offer an excellent user experience to your customers.

Use of Best Practices
A company with relevant expertise and industry knowledge must know how to develop a high-quality PWA by using the best development practices. Therefore, you will receive the PWA build with the latest web development standards and functionalities.

Technical knowledge
Companies with vast coding experience should know the latest programming languages, testing tools, and frameworks. They know what technologies will work for your project. Hence, build a compliant and stable PWA that will work perfectly on any device.

Here we will discuss a few frameworks these PWA development companies use to convert websites into PWA.

ReactJS

Launched by Facebook, it is an open-source library of JavaScript to make a remarkably responsive interface. JQuery has been outclassed by this front-end JavaScript framework. It can be reused for complicated UIs quickly as it is a declarative component-based framework. Due to its virtual DOM, its rendering process is faster.

VueJS
VueJS is an easy-to-use JavaScript framework suitable for beginners. It's developed in a way to improve front-end frameworks such as Angular. VueJS is also known as a progressive framework because of its ability to design high-end Single Page Applications (SPAs) using dual integration.

AngularJS
The AngularJS framework is an open-source JavaScript framework. AngularJS has a higher learning curve than React. SPAs and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) can benefit from their fast loading speed on both the front and back ends. Utilize AngularJS component-based architecture by seeking assistance from Angular web development services.

Wrapping It Up!!
PWA development can provide various benefits such as PWAs are platform-independent; hence you don't need to develop different codebases. PWA functions on web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and offers a native app-like experience. Businesses can improve user experience with PWAs due to fast loading speed.

Because of this, increasing numbers of businesses are moving to Progressive Web Apps by developing new ones by converting their websites into them.

Therefore, you can also do the same to stay ahead of your competitors. Don't worry if you lack technical proficiency; there are various PWA web development services available, you can hire any with robust experience and domain expertise.

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Author

Garry Smith

Garry Smith is a senior PWA developer at the reliable company CSSChopper. He has completed various projects related to PWA development. Therefore, He possesses the requisite skills and expertise in developing market-ready PWA's.He writes informative and engaging blogs to make productive use of her ideal time.