Do you need to have pwa and amp for magento development? A complete overview for your Magento upgrade and new Magento development

In an earlier blogpost of mine, we did have a look at Magento, its advantages, and why online marketers prefer it to other platforms. Today, we are going to cover how pwa and amp for magento development can actually help you.

You must be aware that online stores that were housed in the Magento 1.9 ecosystem have already started migrating to Magento 2.0 since the official support for Magento 1.9 would be ending in June 2020. As a result, Magento users would like to take advantage of the new ecosystem which Magento 2.0 has to offer. And that’s why Magento development has become crucial now.

It is common knowledge that no business organization is going to like it if their website content does not load fast enough on devices, whether mobile, tablets, or desktops. Also, since the majority of the shopping these days happens to happen through mobiles, achieving the same on all different types of smartphones is in itself a challenge. And here Magento development plays a key role. 

In order to improve the efficiency of your website, you have two very important tools to choose from which have their own distinct features — PWA and AMP. AMP and PWA for Magento development is the new buzzword in tech circles and we need to explore its importance in the Magento universe. 

pwa and amp for magento development: What is AMP

AMP was developed by Google in 2015 and is an open-source project which requires less coding in order to speed up your website load. Additionally, it gives a far better experience to the customer and is SEO oriented which enhances the performance of your Magento powered online store. 

pwa and amp for magento development: What is PWA

PWA stands for Progressive Web App and is web apps that generate the look of a regular mobile application. It provides rich offline experiences, pushes notifications, and periodic background syncs. 

Having had a general idea of what AMP and PWA are all about, it becomes important to have a look at the need for PWA and AMP for Magento development. This piece on PWA should interest you.

Working on Google AMP:

The need for AMP and PWA for Magento development shall be clearer once the working of both is known. So, let us see how Google AMP works. 

AMP functions by improving the loading speed of your page. It excludes the unnecessary JavaScript, uses asynchronous loading after sizing the page elements statically. You need not redo or work on an entire site, instead, you can choose the pages you want whose performance has to be improved by focusing on web design AMP development. 

The process to be followed:

• Create AMP template for particular type of content.
• Use a rel=’’amphtml” tag on the non-AMP version of the content ( AMP version should be accessible to search engines).
• AMP version should direct to the non-AMP version with a canonical tag.

Working of Progressive Web App:

The necessity of pwa and amp for magento development shall be clearer once we know the working of both.

Basically, PWAs are web apps and for both iOS and Android their look and feel are like native mobile apps. It is able to support features like camera, geolocation in the web apps.

The process to be followed:

• In order to make a Progressive Web App, install and register for a service worker separately, and relate it with your app.
• You shall be needing Social Worker, which incidentally is a worker script written in JavaScript. PWA is actually able to perform its activities because it works behind the scenes independently to help PWA. It caches static elements, pages and once a visitor opens the app, these are displayed.
• In order to increase user engagement with your web apps use web push notifications.

pwa and amp for magento development: Benefits of AMP for Magento development

• Pages are instantly loaded since they are easily cached.
• All existing formats of ads are supported.
• Enhancement in engagement factor.
• The website becomes 4 times faster as the load time of a page is reduced to less than 1 second.
• Initially, it had a very narrow scope of utility, which was the usage in news articles but presently has diversified to other areas of content.
• The business and visual design is under the full control of the publishers of the website.

Well, you can go through this article for more on AMP.  

pwa and amp for magento development: Benefits of PWA

• Faster page loading.
• Enhancement of conversion rate.
• It takes just one second for a user to scroll 60 frames.
• User engagement possible by the usage of push notifications.
• A user will be able to work even if the internet connection is weak.
• Permits smooth navigations and animations.
• URL bar not required for opening on full screen.
• Users can access the website by using a Home screen icon on the device.
• These webpages get stored in the cache with Application Shell and on repeat visits are instantly loaded in less than 5 seconds.

Whether the usage of pwa and amp for magento development is at all that essential, can be concluded only after discussing the disadvantages of each.

Disadvantages of AMP:

• It is unable to enhance the search engine ranking.
• The user activity cannot be tracked on AMP pages.
• Not suitable for an e-commerce website.

Disadvantages of PWA:

• There are platform limitations that lead to re-engagement issues.

pwa and amp for magento development: Which to choose between AMP and PWA

Actually, both are needed in order to give your visitor better user experience. AMP enables users to get quick access to content whereas PWA gives a better user experience. There are some who say that PWA is better than AMP but in a similar vein, you need to note that there are hundreds of users who visit your store each day and their mobile is the place where all apps are stored. Also, they want websites to load faster. This is where AMP comes into play.

Also, PWA has become essential today as technology these days allows PWAs to work across all browsers, so a website needs not to pay for each browser. This in turn will lead to increased traffic, more leads, and conversion of leads to business. You need to think wisely and be properly aware of your business needs and this can help you to choose the best thing for the best Magento development.

pwa and amp for magento development

Well, by now I am sure you realize that you shall be needing both PWA and AMP for Magento development in order to leverage the strengths of both and give your user the best possible experience both in terms of speed and features. 

Also, we have been a leading player in the area of Magento development. So, if you have any requirements or queries regarding Magento development, please do get in touch with us and we shall be glad to be able to serve you. 

Before I wind up, as usual am looking forward to your feedback on this piece. Do let me know if there are other topics of interest related to Magento development that you would like to be discussed over here. Am sure we could work out something so that I can write on things that interest you.