The web has expanded drastically in the last few years which brought numerous challenges in its wake. Among them, the issues that troubled users the most are the unreliability and the slow nature of the mobile web. Many new technologies, led by Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), were introduced to address these issues.
These technologies guarantee to deliver a richer, faster, and immersive experience that engages and inspires the users. They came just at the right time when mobile usage is experiencing unprecedented growth.
With over half of the web traffic coming from mobile devices, developers shifted their focus and introduced tools like Accelerated Mobile Pages and Progressive Web pages to deliver a remarkable mobile experience.
In this article, we will discuss various aspects of AMPs and PWAs and determine which technology is better for mobile usage. We will also walk you through the pros and cons of the two tools, how they work, and why they were needed in the first place.
In today’s fast-paced world, users are looking for faster and reliable experience. However, not until very late, most of the websites were taking too long to load which left the mobile users annoyed.
As a result, most of the users would leave the web page midway without even seeing what the website is offering. Stats show that 53 percent of visitors abandon a site if it takes more than 3 minutes to load.
Mobile apps seemed the right option to ensure user engagement as they engage users 20x more minutes than websites do. But again, the top 1,000 mobile apps reach 4x fewer people than the top 1,000 mobile websites.
Moreover, a disproportionate 77 percent of users leave a mobile app in just 72 hours after they download it. With such dismal stats, brands are looking for ways to retarget and engage their users.
Progressive Web Apps and Accelerated Mobile Pages emerged as the solutions to overcome slow page load speed and poor user engagement. The emergence of these technologies came around as the savior for brands who failed to deliver a satisfactory user experience to their website and app users.
Accelerated Mobile Pages or shortly AMP is an open source project by Google that allows developers to build web pages that load faster on mobile devices. It is created on JavaScript and offers near-instant and seamless experience than regular HTML.
Google integrated AMPs into its mobile search in 2016, and pages that make use of AMP could appear on SERP with an ‘AMP’ designation.
AMP strips all the irrelevant scripts and JavaScript to save bandwidth; hence, we only get a plain page that contains only the crucial information without the fancy features that otherwise comes in HTML pages.
The removal of irrelevant scripts may affect the user experience and engagement on a website, but it ensures that information is delivered in the fastest possible time to mobile users.
AMP improves the web page loading speed by trimming unnecessary JavaScript. It statically sizes the page elements and uses asynchronous loading to reduce the loading time.
The good news is that you do not need to redo or work on the entire site to improve the performance of certain pages on the website. Instead, you can target the specific pages that you intend to improve by focusing on web design AMP development. To create an AMP page, you need to perform the following steps:
As AMP is designed to load faster by showing only the useful content, there are often some visual limitations that come with it. These include:
PWA is an acronym for Progressive Web Apps. These are web pages that look like native mobile apps and provide similar navigation and interaction. It also helps users revisit your website by offering push notifications, fast loading, and offline web pages.
They support all the modern web capabilities which make them appear to users as traditional or native mobile applications.
For an app to be considered as a Progressive Web App, it must include the following features:
Despite the obvious benefits, Progressive Web Apps show limited capabilities when it comes to the device’s hardware features and integration.
Read also: Which One to Choose: Native Apps or Progressive Web Apps?
There is no clear winner between AMP and PWA as both perform best in combination. While one provides you instant content, the other ensures that users engage and interact with the website.
The choice between the two also depends on the type of website that you run. AMP sounds good for sites that aren’t too media heavy and mostly contain static content, for instance, news publications. But if you’re running an e-commerce site, you will let visitors have a user-friendly experience even without installing your mobile app. In such a case, PWA will be a wise choice.
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