Should You Migrate Your Magento Storefront to PWA?

When it comes to creating and running an eCommerce store, there are a lot of technical and marketing challenges the business owners should solve in parallel to stay competitive. Making your website more powerful technically and delivering better user experience is a match worth striving for. Migrating your storefront to PWA (Progressive Web Application) and switching to headless eCommerce can be a winning strategy to achieve this goal.

Let’s discover the main reasons to follow this tactic. 

The Concept of PWA in a Nutshell

Before deciding to migrate your Magento frontend to PWA, let’s dwell on the essence of such a tactic and find out more about the core idea behind progressive apps. 

Moving your Magento storefront to PWA means separating the backend and frontend of your eCommerce store, leaving the first on Magento, and transforming the second into a progressive web app. Such an approach is called headless eCommerce which means that from now on, your back- and frontend are independent of each other, however, they still interact by exchanging API calls. 

A progressive web application, in turn, is an app that runs across the browsers and can work even without an internet connection, delivering the static data that was previously cached. 

Main Reasons to Migrate Your Magento Frontend to PWA

Below are the main reasons for switching to headless eCommerce and transforming your frontend into a PWA app. 

• Close-to-native user experience. Progressive web applications allow for creating a close-to-native UI and UX, despite being running from the browser. And this is just the feature that makes pogressive app building more winning idea compared to creating a native app. The matter is that 25% of mobile apps are used only once  – and then, abandoned forever. Installing a native mobile app usually requires some patients from the users, while progressive solutions are ready to deliver-close to native expereince instantly. 
• Official app stores independence. In addition to delivering close-to-native experience, progressive web applications allow for avoiding the requirements and restrictions of the App Store and Play Market. This is a good opportunity for the companies that aren’t ready to invest in native application development, plus moving to PWA can be an option for the businesses operating in “gray” eCommerce niches. 
• Better conversion. Moving your frontend to PWA is flexibility-adding since you are no longer limited by the design solutions embedded into CMS your store is powered by. Instead, you are welcome to design your frontend in such a way to drive more conversions and simplify the user journey. For example, after moving their frontend to PWA, Alibaba achieved a 77% conversion rate boost. 
• The opportunity for making quick tweaks to the design. What’s more, separating your frontend from the backend allows for making quick tweaks to the design, without interrupting the latter. This, in turn, opens more opportunities for testing and finding the most performant design options.
• Fast loading and better SEO.  Progressive web apps load faster, especially when compared to the huge eCommerce websites with multi-level architecture. From this perspective, switching to PWA is an opportunity to reduce bounce rate because of faster loading, allowing the users to show better behavior factors. The bounce rate of progressive apps is 42,8% lower compared to similar mobile-optimized websites. Being one of the important behavior factors, the bounce rate is essential for SEO, so moving the eCommerce storefront to PWA can be another value-adding opportunity for the projects striving for better SEO performance.

What Are The Limitations of Moving to PWA

Despite all the advantages, the tactic to migrate your Magento frontend to PWA also has some limitations which you should take into account before making the final decision. 

• Technical alignment. Switching to headless eCommerce implies using completely different technologies on the front and backend of your store which should be aligned with each other. From the practical standpoint, it means hiring additional tech specialists experienced in headless eCommerce web apps development. 
• More support and maintenance issues. Because of the reason above, running your frontend on PWA while leaving the backend on the CMS you are using requires more support and maintenance efforts. 

Is There a Ready Solution for Seamless Migration?

Moving your Magento frontend to PWA is both value-adding and technically complex. However, there are several ready-made solutions that can make this transition more seamless. For example, you can use Magento PWA Studio – a development toolkit that allows for creating and deploying a PWA storefront on the top of Magento 2. In this case, hiring Magento 2 developers would be a smart choice to make an app leveraging both Magento-native features and PWA technologies. 

There are also third-party solutions like Simicart or ScandiPWA. These are ready-made PWA themes that come with Magento 2 PWA integration and can be easily customized. 

As one more option, you can build your PWA frontend from scratch, using JS-inspired tools and frameworks, like Angular or Vue, and then, integrate it with the Magento backend. Our ecommerce website developers would be happy to help you with any of the strategies above, depending on your business goal and future scalability projections. 

Conclusion

Switching to headless eCommerce and moving your storefront to PWA can be a winning strategy for the businesses striving for delivering better user experience, boosting their conversion rate, and improving SEO performance. Despite some technical challenges, such a tactic is pretty promising for getting a cutting-edge competitive advantage.

IdeaInYou is a Magento 2 development company with multi-domain experience and the highest-end tech specialists under the roof. Contact us now to discuss the ways our latest expertise can be useful for your eCommerce business boost!