World Experience in PWA Implementation

In 2016, Lancôme saw mobile traffic surpass desktop traffic. Nevertheless, the rate of converting Carts to purchases on mobile devices was 2.5 times lower: 15% against 38% on desktop. It turned out that smartphone and tablet users had problems with purchasing products and used to abandon their shopping carts.

The native application did not cope with problem:only customers who visited the Lancôme e-store regularly were interested in installing it.

PWA technology has allowed Lancôme to create an application providing an immersive experience of making purchases.

After the updates, time until the page is interactive fell by 84%, with a corresponding 15% decrease in bounce
rates. There was a corresponding mobile sessions length rise by more than 50%, and conversions increase by 17%.

iPhone users are extremely important for Lancôme, as they make 65% of their mobile audience. The PWA implementation was followed by a 53% increase in session length and 10% bounce rate decrease even though iOS did not support many PWA functions at the time of Lancôme PWA development.

On Android devices (which support push-notifications), Lancôme also took advantage of interactive re-engagement technologies, and managed to increase the conversion rates on abandoned carts.

In January 2017, Forbes implemented an extensive website update and developed a PWA version for mobile users. The site and the app worked in parallel, providing mobile users with similar content. This allowed Forbes to compare the actual PWA efficiency.

Forbes removed ads and unnecessary transitions from the app, thus facilitating the web-page navigation and reading. As a result, Forbes PWA allowed cutting down the average amount of time it takes to render content to 2.5 seconds from 6.5 seconds, whereas the average size of its web-pages decreased from 2 megabytes to 300 kilobytes. The PWA users spend up to 40 percent more time per session and view 15 percent more pages per session. There also was a 20 percent decrease in the number of users who read less than one-fourth of an article.

Uber has developed a single-page PWA with a super-lightweight core of only 50 kB. It loads on a mobile device in mere seconds even on 2G networks, looks like a standard native application and runs smoothly even on inexpensive and slow devices.

Pinterest redesigned its mobile website and developed a PWA with a downloadable core weigh of 150 kB. The time to interactivity decreased by 4 times  to 5.6 seconds, and to 3.9 seconds on repeat visits. The time to the first relevant display decreased by 2.3 times – to 1.8 seconds.

Eventually, Pinterest deployed support for push notifications and improved usability for unauthorized users for their PWA.