The PWA and AMP are the perfect combinations of speed and function.
How should you combine PWA and AMP to build feature-rich and blazingly fast mobile web applications? Well, both are designed to improve users’ web experience while using a compatible platform of a mobile device.
However, most users have a lot of confusion between PWA and AMP. Let’s understand the difference between PWA and AMP and how to combine them for building feature-rich and faster mobile web applications.
Let’s first get to know what these terms mean.
What is PWA?
The term ‘PWA’ stands for progressive web apps that aim to convey the design and feel to users with the mobile application’s expertise by accessing the websites through browsers.
Simply described, a PWA (progressive web app) is web content that has app-like capabilities and works well when its services and platforms are accessed via the mobile web rather than a mobile application.
In comparison to mobile devices, PWA is the better option because mobile devices enable users to download apps/native programs from Google Play or the App Store.
Overall, you can understand that PWAs are progressive web apps that consider service workers, manifest, and combine web-platform features with a progressive enhancement so that users can get a similar experience to native apps.
Why Do You Need Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)?
PWAs are less expensive compared to native apps. They work consistently, are easily accessible, and work on-demand while not consuming your smartphone’s data or memory.
The best part is that when using the progressive web app over an identical version of native applications, it becomes easier for users to consume less amount of data. However, it doesn’t mean users will forget the convenience of a native app. They can install the PWA to their home screen without doing a full download.
PWAs integrate the benefits of mobile apps and online apps into a single software solution. It is a strategy that helps you interact with a website if it is a native application. Moreover, PWAs are easily shared and highly responsive solutions that you can use offline.
PWA – Ensures Native User Experience For Web Applications
At its core, PWA is made up of a basic set of technologies, which are combined in a smarter way so that end-users can have a better user experience. For mobile devices, PWA offers advanced features like caching content, background syncing, offline support and push notifications integrated into your web application. You may know these features are suitable for getting a rich user experience. That’s why one can compare them with native mobile apps.
Users can even install PWA shortcuts to their mobile home screen because web browsers give tight constraints to websites for loading, plus ensures that PWA will remain lightweight while not eating up your CPU, memory, and storage.
Besides, many people believe that PWA is slow than AMP because it incorporates advanced features. Yet, this is not entirely true when you maintain a minimal and efficient PWA footprint.
There is a common assumption that the building of PWA necessitates a lot of JavaScript, libraries, or frameworks like React, Angular, and VueJS. But Pwa is an application or a website served through HTTPS with a registered service worker, valid web manifest file, and a fetch event handler.
Some of the key features of the PWA (Progressive Web App) are:
- A complete app-like interface.
- The page transition is very much high.
- Compatibility is high with different browsers and devices.
- Sending push notifications to mobile devices.
- The ability to access content when the user is not connected to the Internet.
Service Workers
Service workers are code components of JavaScript which play the role of a proxy between a browser and the network. It can store the essential data in the browser cache when you open the web page for the first time. In the second time, the goal of a service worker is to receive this data from the cache and check for the network availability. Apart from that, it allows you to work offline, manage push notifications, and boosts the response time.
The Manifest File
The Manifest file is a JSON file that helps you know the information about your application. For example, it contains the data about the PWA icon located on the home screen, including its short name, theme, and color palette. If you have an Android phone and are using the Chrome browser, the Manifest file will allow PWA to install automatically to your phone.
The Secure HTTPS Protocol
A progressive web app is a must-have option in designing to enable HTTPS on the server. But, there is no issue at all because Chrome Browser has done the labelling of all websites that don’t use unsafe protocols for some time. Whereas the concept of PWA is important for service workers because they are vulnerable to breaches or network failures.
Additionally, it is possible to modify answers and intercept network requests with service workers, and it is suitable to utilize the secure protocol to ensure network security and data security.
Now, you can realize that building faster and feature-rich web apps are possible with PWA because it gives a native-like experience. However, you may be curious to know why there is a need to implement AMP apps when PWA is already available to address most of the challenges.
Let’s discuss what values AMP can bring into web apps.
What is AMP?
It is an accelerated mobile page that is designed to load the mobile-friendly web page instantly. It aims to provide a smooth and faster loading solution in order to give the best user experience.
Besides, the collaboration of Twitter and Google makes it possible to develop faster mobile pages.
Introduced as an accelerated mobile page, an open-source project and technology were integrated by Google in Feb 2016. Google was first introduced by mobile-first indexing. That’s why many developers and companies started to find an alternative solution or AMP (accelerate mobile page) as an excellent choice for them.
Speed is one of the essential factors for AMP, or it is a vital non-functional requirement to obtain promising results since it was incorporated with Google’s mobile search results.
Due to the limitation of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, AMP ensures a lightweight response and lightning speed for web pages. As per statistics, AMP keeps CSS to 50kb while avoiding all unnecessary JavaScript.
Similarly, Google offers a caching option for AMPs that work as a CDN. The cache of AMP pages stores dynamically with the mission to minimize the load time on Google searches. AMP can work for emails, stories, blogs, advertisements, and many more.
AMP Improves Speed & Performance of Mobile Websites
Providing faster mobile pages is the main focus of AMP as Google penalizes the pages with SEO ranking, mainly those which are extremely slow. To avoid this, developers started to build unique and faster websites. The idea came from Google, which is called AMP (accelerated mobile pages).
One of the main benefits of AMP is it is loved by search engines, as accelerated mobile pages are essentially important when it comes to SEO, for websites to rank faster in search results.
Some of the key features of AMP are as follow:
- Delivers a better user experience by accelerating the speed of websites.
- Helps improve search engine rankings on mobile.
- Increase the mobile browser’s visibility for content creators.
- On AMP, it is crucial to track the site’s performance along with users because its analytical resources can analyze the versions of AMP in high depth and promise to deliver a great user experience.
- The non-AMP pages rank slow in comparison to AMP. Thus, if you want to improve the search engine ranking on mobile, you can implement AMP on your website.
- It provides user-friendly access to ensure good connectivity with computers and minimize the bounce rate of websites.
How Do PWA and AMP Differ From Each Other?
- When using a PWA, you will get a feel of a web page that looks like a mobile application. On the other hand, the look and feel of AMPs are also similar, but you are familiar now that you are using a web page.
- In PWAs, the program code is written by using certain sections of the current code or from scratch. However, redundant JS and CSS omit in the case of AMPs, especially from the web page’s current code. With this approach, it becomes easy for you to load the web page faster.
- Using cache, PWAs can support offline operations. To run the operations, AMPs need a stable Internet connection.
- PWAs look for optimized ways to deliver a native app-like experience. While AMPs ensure the quick loading of web pages because they are open source libraries.
- PWAs are not compatible with all platforms; a minor inconvenience can happen on iOS because it doesn’t support all hardware functionality, such as GPS, Bluetooth, NFC, or accelerometers. Inversely, AMPs can support all browsers on all platforms.
- As discussed above, AMP helps in quicker loading, and PWAs can cause a delay when loading for the first time. But, later, it promises to provide a faster experience.
- After loading the pages in the browser, PWAs show a high level of involvement. While AMPs have a low level of engagement.
Should PWA and AMP be Implemented Together?
To get a superior user experience, one can implement both the progressive web app & AMP apps together, as PWAs are suitable for the apps that need to interact with the user.
For example, apps like online learning platforms, social media, and eCommerce websites are those platforms where the app needs to be constantly updated, and it should be responsible with the help of using the right technology. Make sure Twitter uses progressive web apps.
AMP is ideal for platforms where there is a wide array of content, such as newspapers or online magazines. The benefit of AMP is it can load the content instantly, but it gives limited interaction opportunities.
From the SEO standpoint, Google takes a favor of AMP pages and ensures a high click-through rate by listing them in the carousel of top stories. Consequently, PWA doesn’t provide the direct benefit in terms of SEO, but a better user experience leads to higher retention rates.
Final Thoughts
Both PWA and AMP are robust technologies because PWA provides more benefits, and AMP is cheaper, easier, and faster to develop. To view web pages on mobile phones, implementing AMPs and PWAs can become a beneficial option because they both can significantly reduce the page load time and boost the user experience, but AMPs are more powerful for speed loading compared to PWAs.
Overall, the combination of PWA and AMP is perfect for applications that have requirements like push notifications and offline working, and apps that deal with content.
Call us today at +91 172 5097801 or contact us online to learn more about how we can develop websites using AMP to help grow your business!