Developing Progressive Web Apps (PWA) based on Craft CMS

08/13/2018
by John Doe

PWA (Progressive Web Apps) is the Chinese name for Progressive Web Apps, and since Google launched this technology in 2015, PWA technology has become quite mature and widespread, and most of the famous enterprise websites have already supported or are starting to support PWA to rapidly implement and iterate mobile app entry. Take Twitter as an example, after Twitter Lite supported PWA, the average user dwell time increased by 65%, the number of tweets sent from the website increased by 75%, and the bounce rate decreased by 20%. It has been proven by a wide range of statistics that enterprise and brand websites that support PWA technology significantly improve the frequency and length of user visits, which effectively drives business efficiency.

The core technologies include App Manifest, Service Worker, Web Push, and so on. The core technologies include App Manifest, Service Worker, Web Push, etc. Simply put, PWAs combine the strengths of both the Web and App: incremental, responsive, offline, app-like, instantly updated, secure, searchable by search engines, pushable, installable, and linkable.

Our studio website, MagicVar.com, already supports PWA technology, which automatically prompts users to create a web app to their mobile desktop as soon as they visit our site for the first time through their mobile browser. It is different from creating a mobile desktop shortcut, which is just a URL connection that opens a web browser to access the mobile version of the site when triggered by a click; the PWA technology enables the Web App to have the experience of a real app and still be able to use the Web App to browse queries to be automatically cached data even if the phone is not connected to the internet, see below.

MagicVar.com is a template based on Craft CMS 3. 100% flexible and a Swiss Army knife for people with source code neatness OCD, the benefits of choosing Craft CMS for our PWA are substantial: first and foremost, genetically based SEO friendliness, extremely fast front-end rendering, very high access speeds, excellent site security and horizontal and vertical scaling without resorting to third-party plugins. Anyone with a little web development experience knows that too many plugins and passive attachment features can make a website a mess, difficult to maintain and extremely vulnerable to hackers.