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Top Progressive Web App Examples: Tinder, Twitter, Walmart

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Pushing to provide a superior user experience, enterprises of all kinds are now adopting the latest technologies, including Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), Single-Page Applications (SPA), and React websites. Mobile network performance is no longer a concern for these industry leaders who’ve shifted to headless eCommerce and adopted eCommerce progressive web apps to provide lighting-fast, converting experiences.

Because speed equates to revenue, and eCommerce is a highly competitive industry, it’s difficult to find progressive web app examples. But we believe this information should be shared with the public as the PWA adopters are receiving higher visibility, traffic, engagement, and conversions. To help eCommerce companies understand the current landscape and get a feel for where they stand, we showcase a few of the top eCommerce PWA examples monthly. Within this installment, we have broken down the leading companies in the industries of home decor, social networking, and mass retailers.

Social networking platforms with PWAs

1. Pinterest – PWA

Pinterest was one of the early adopters in building a PWA for their iOS and Android users. A platform meant to inspire creative minds had people leaving their mobile experience. Pinterest reported their new native app-like PWA experience increased their active mobile user count by more than double, and the session duration increased nearly 4-fold. Their homepage Javascript payload went from ~490kb to ~190kb, creating nearly-instant page loads for users even in low-bandwidth environments. Push notifications, “Add to Homescreen” prompt, “night mode” setting and asset caching have created a truly engaging experience for mobile users.

2. Tinder – PWA

Tinder, the dating app seeing over 60M monthly users in over 250 different countries, delivers a PWA for desktop and mobile users. Known as Tinder Online, the new web experience receives more swipes, profile edits, and time spent per user session than their native app experience. The small size of the PWA core helped Tinder cut load times from 11.9 seconds to 4.69 seconds and have users engaging — and swiping right — at an all-time high.

Comparing the Tinder PWA to native app examples. (Source: Medium)

3. Twitter – PWA

In a direct effort to create more user engagement, Twitter turned to PWA technology to deliver a better user experience and saw major wins. Twitter Lite is a great PWA example, as it increased pages per session by 65% and boosted the amount of Tweets sent by 75%. By adding data saver mode and optimizing the size of their PWA down to 60kb, their 300+ million active mobile users could quickly navigate through content, even on 2G networks.

Home decor delivering PWAs

4. Annie Selke – PWA + AMP + SSR

Annie Selke brings quality home decor to over 170k visitors a month. Understanding the importance of website speed on SEO and SEM, the home furnishing company launched its PWA with auto-AMP conversion on Edgio’s serverless Backend For Frontend (BFF). Annie Selke saw a dramatic 40.41% increase in mobile organic traffic and cut their browsing speeds to a median load time of 538 ms on Edgio. Through AMP, server-side rendering, and PWA technologies, Annie Selke sees an average first-page load time of 0.74s across traffic sources.

Deliver a sub-second eCommerce wesbite

Edgio consistently delivers sub-500ms median page loads for large eCommerce websites. These speed gains are known to lead to 15-30% conversion lifts.

5. Kirkland’s Inc. – PWA + AMP + SSR

Kirkland’s has gone beyond their 431 stores in 37 states and optimized for an eCommerce PWA to reach any customer at any time. Optimizing site speed was their main objective, as they identified it as a competitive forefront. The home decor retailer used Edgio’s open-source React PWA framework with built-in AMP conversion and server-side rendering support on Edgio infrastructure. Kirkland’s is now among the fastest retail websites and enables quick and easy purchases with sub-second page loads, thumbprint checkout, and one-click logins.

6. West Elm – PWA

West Elm, owned by parent company Williams-Sonoma Inc. is a great industry leader that has adopted PWA technology for its mobile commerce experience. The modern style of their products matches their PWA experience with a sleek, stylish look and feel for their 4 million monthly users. Their eCommerce progressive web app brought them a 15% increase in average time on site, and a 9% lift in conversions.

Mass retailers with eCommerce PWAs

7. Macy’s. – SPA

Macy’s, an IR6 company and #1 in their apparel and accessories industry, transitioned to headless eCommerce to provide the best experience possible for their 60+ million monthly visitors. The result: Double-digit online growth over the last 3 years. Macy’s site speed has improved tremendously and, in turn, boosted its search ranking and customer experience. In this recent webinar, Lenny Stofsky, Director of Engineering at Macy’s, states that the headless approach and its microservices architecture make them more agile and nimble. “Through automated Dev ops, improved regression testing, and dedicated teams to scale and innovate, we can deploy every two weeks,” states Stofsky.

Hear Lenny Stofsky, Director of Engineering at Macys.com, walk through the transition from a monolithic single-vendor eCommerce platform to a flexible, best-of-breed system based on microservices.

8. Staples – PWA

Staples’s website speed became a top priority to provide the best user experience possible to drive more sales. These desired results became important as the mass retailer found that their load time increased, their bounce rate increased, and their conversion rate decreased. After a full analysis of their customer journey experience, Staples could reduce their median homepage load time by 1 second and shave 6 seconds off their load time for the 98th percentile. The result: A 10% increase in their conversion rate.

9. Target – PWA

Target receives an impressive +100M monthly visitors but still faces tough competition with Amazon and Walmart — two leading eCommerce enterprises that adopted modern technology and wooed their customers. Target focused on creating a more seamless transition between mobile and desktop after a survey revealed that 80 percent of Target shoppers start their retail experience on one device and are likely to finish on another. To quickly respond to the ever-evolving landscape, a PWA became their solution to enhance some of their core digital-store offerings and provide an engaging, unified experience for shoppers on mobile and desktop.

10. Walmart – SPA

Walmart wins in all categories. Walmart.com and Walmart Groceries use modern technology to optimize their mobile and desktop online shopping experience. With over 11,700 worldwide, the retail giant wanted to awe all customers “when they walk into our stores or click around our site,” states Walmart U.S. COO Judith McKenna. Modern technology has dramatically affected their immersive online experience and the way they view site speed as it correlates with time spent on-site. The eCommerce site found that for every 100 ms of page load improvement, there was up to one-percent increase in incremental revenue.

Bottom line

Progressive web apps are the future of eCommerce. This new age of modern web technology includes a race between eCommerce companies to deliver the fastest site possible and the best user experience to win a competitive advantage. No longer are native apps the best solution — PWAs are equally interactive and perhaps even faster. Consumers have high-speed expectations, and eCommerce professionals would be wise to provide them with a lightning-fast, engaging experience.

To rise above the noise, follow the example of early adopting industry leaders as they switch from traditional websites to PWAs/SPAs/React websites and deliver a nearly-instantaneous experience that drives conversions and SEO wins.

For additional progressive web app examples, check out this list of modern eCommerce companies using SPA, PWA, and React frameworks, or schedule a consultative conversation to learn how Edgio can help you get up and running with a PWA in 12 weeks.