PWA

Since mobile phones took over the web and currently, more than 60% of total Internet browsing is happening via mobile devices, it is becoming more crucial to give your users native experience with your website. PWA (Progressive Web Application) plugin serves as a wrapper for your website turning it into a mobile app.

As a result, user engagement with your website increases, bringing more traffic, better SEO rankings, faster website access and load times and many other benefits offered by the PWA technologies.

How it works

The plugin creates and adds a JSON manifest file to the source of all your website pages. The manifest file is multilingual and is installed in your website’s current language. The file specifies the name of the app, the icon and the look of the PWA (as full screen, standalone) as well as some other parameters. The plugin will also add all the necessary icons required for the PWA.

Plugin system requirements

When considering the PWA plugin for your website, keep in mind that it may only be installed on websites working on HTTPS protocol with a php version at least 7.2 or later. If your hosting does not support these requirements, consider upgrading before you move on with PWA plugin.

Front End

When a user enters your website from a mobile device, he will see a popup notification offering him to install a PWA to his mobile device. After installation, the PWA icon will appear on his mobile device among other apps installed on a user phone.

After that, a user will be able to access your website as if it were a native mobile app. Since most of the website content is cached and stored on a user’s device, accessing a website via a PWA plugin will be faster, giving users better browsing experience.

Browser support

Full browser support for PWA (with an automatic banner and push notifications) is available for the following browsers:

• Google Chrome (version 57+);
• Chrome for Android (version 62+);
• Mozilla Firefox (version 57+);
• Firefox for Android (version 58+);

As PWA grows in popularity, it is expected that more browsers will add full PWA support. You may view the latest PWA support information on browser support here.

At the time of releasing a PWA plugin, support of PWA on iOS and Safari is only partial meaning that the custom banner for installation and push notifications are not available. Hopefully, the new versions of Safari will add the full support for PWA. Taking into account that iOS does not offer an automatic banner offering to install the PWA, we have added a custom banner option instructing the user on how to install the PWA to their iOS devices. On Android devices, the banner offering installation of the PWA is created automatically and displayed by the browser itself.

Push notifications

One of PWA’s key features are the push notifications for logged in users. The user will be offered to subscribe to a push notification service. Upon accepting it, a user will be alerted by push notifications regarding new messages, newly created ads conforming to saved search criteria. The user may disable the push notification service in his profile settings at any time.

Back end

The plugin adds a manager to the admin panel of your website from where you may configure its settings. You may enter a name for the app as well as its description. You may also set the background color for the app, upload the app icon and a launch screen that appears on app load.

Another section of the plugin manager shows PWA usage stats in a grid. You may view all of the information on PWAs installed from your website, such as a user’s country, browser, date of installation, country, city and other useful information.