Over the past couple of years, the hype of Progressive Web Applications rose worldwide. No wonder PWA developers can bring well-optimized solutions to the table for flawless user engagement by providing app-like navigation and excellent visual content.
The PWAs were firstly introduced by Google in 2015, to make web apps that can enhance user engagement and provide optimized user experience more efficient.
The future of PWAs is brighter than ever before as it started gaining immense popularity after its launch, many companies and clients wanted their web apps converted into PWAs.
What is PWA
The full form of PWA is Progressive Web Application, an enhanced web platform that allows mobile users to have an app-like experience without installing an app from any other platform such as the play store and app store.
PWAs provide high performance and better visual content as it’s based on front-end technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Those who develop PWAs are called PWA developers.
Popular PWA Examples
Twitter is a well-known social media for microblogging and social networking. Twitter once conducted a survey and found out that 80% of its users are mobile. As Twitter realized that not everyone in the world has a strong internet connection, they decided to build a PWA (Twitter Lite). As they launched their PWA in 2017 they started getting massive results –
1. An increase in pages per session by 65%.
2. Increase in tweets sent by 75%.
3. 20% decrease in bounce rate.
Forbes
Forbes is a world-famous and well-known magazine that provides users with different types of articles. Forbes noticed huge traffic on their website in 2017, and they realized web apps have some flaws that are affecting their audience. They launched their PWA and saw the tremendous results –
1. Increase page view by 15%.
2. Increase engagement rate by 100%.
3. Increase the number of users by 6 times.
4. 43% increase in pages per session.
Why PWA
PWAs are more reliable than traditional apps, it provides a clean user experience and efficiency to load web pages. A user can feel satisfaction if the platform loads up quickly with enhanced visual content. This helps companies to get a huge portion of users as they provide satisfaction to users via their PWAs.
Most search engines display PWAs on top of their search results as they offer a smooth user experience. PWAs provide advanced features and are highly versatile as they can be equipped with upgrades and advanced functionalities. It’s highly recommended that companies upgrade their website to PWAs so they can get the benefits of having an edge over their competitors.
PWAs will increase the reach by adding more mobile audiences as it provides the best features and functionality. The PWAs are cheap to make as compared to a traditional application hence companies will be saving a big chunk of money.
PWAs increase mobile communication rates.
To keep it short, The developers who work in the PWA development domain or create web apps are called PWA developers. PWA developers are highly qualified professionals who use programming languages such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to create responsive and efficient web apps.
What do PWA Developers do?
PWA Developers use their development experience to create web apps. PWA developers optimize web applications to provide a smooth user experience, efficient loading time, app-like navigation, and excellent visual content.
PWA developers engage with clients to know their requirements and build a pipeline for the development of a PWA, and accordingly use required tools to build progressive web apps.
Technical Skills to Hire PWA Developers
Hiring PWA developers is a difficult task as companies receive a large chunk of CVs, and to find the best-suited candidates companies may need to look out for technical skills which are required for the development of PWA, accordingly organizations can shortlist candidates for the further recruitment process.
Ionic
Ionic is an app development platform heavily used by PWA developers, ionic is based on Apache Cordova and Angular Frameworks that work on tech stacks, allowing PWA developers to use competitive frameworks. It provides rich toolkits to cover PWA functionality, UI elements, unit testing, prebuilt routing, etc. Ionics offers attractive core components for developing PWAs.
Angular
Angular is the oldest JavaScript-enabled framework that offers many tools for building reliable and optimized PWAs. Angular is the best Framework for PWA developers, as It utilizes web workers and server-side rendering for optimum performance of progressive web apps. Angular offers templates that are useful in creating PWAs.
Polymer
Polymer is built by google containing a lightweight JavaScript framework that contains various PWA tools for the development of optimized web apps. The polymer is used by many PWA developers as it has a wide variety of templates and offers the best documentation. It creates reusable components and sync data with devices, simplifying the development process, providing APIs, and better optimization by using PRPL patterns.
VueJS
VueJS is one of the most advanced JavaScript frameworks widely used by PWA developers due to its easy coding feature. It’s suitable for developing single-page apps and interfaces. Also, it’s effective for website and mobile app development. Just like Polymer, it offers detailed documentation for PWA developers to understand all the things properly. VueJS offers fast app delivery.
React PWA Library
React PWA Libraries are the most popular libraries used by PWA developers to build SEO-friendly PWAs. Also, it’s fast, developer-friendly, and offers handy tools to speed up the development process. ReactJS framework is used to make single and multi-page apps, with addition to this JS libraries can help PWA developers generate server-side and client-side render pages, API integrations, and routing. React also offers better documentation, extensive libraries, and a massive developer community.
PWA Builder
PWA builder is a great choice for PWA developers to transform websites into PWAs with minimal development work quickly and efficiently. Most PWA developers use PWA Builder for its easy and intuitive features. It automatically detects whether the site can support PWA features or not.
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an open-source tool built by Google for auditing various PWA features, which is often used by PWA developers. It offers several essential features that help improve PWAs quality and makes sure that PWA offers an app-like experience to audiences. Furthermore, it offers PWA developers an opportunity to test the web app in poor or offline network conditions.
Magneto PWA Studio
Magneto PWA Studio is a toolkit used to develop the storefront on top of magneto e-commerce. Magneto PWA Studio offers various libraries and tools that PWA developers can use to utilize e-commerce stores efficiently.
Scandi PWA
Scandi PWA is a ready-made tool designed for Magento eCommerce and widely used by PWA developers. It offers the most efficient way to utilize ready-made PWA for any Magneto store. It offers better documentation for PWA developers to find out and resolve an issue. Also, it has a huge community from which developers can get help.
Benefits of PWA
1. One of the major benefits of PWA is that users, as well as companies, don’t have to rely on the traditional app store.
2. Any company can develop and deploy PWA on the internet through URL by hiring PWA developers.
3. PWA is cost-effective as compared to traditional native apps.
4. PWA can be ranked well on the search result page which is not achievable by traditional apps.
5. Any company can hire PWA developers to ensure their PWAs work online as well as offline.
6. PWA can be equipped with push notification capabilities which make engagements flawless.
7. The maintenance of PWA is easy and quick to update with minimal cost, and the updates can reflect within a short time without waiting for approvals.
PWA vs Native Apps
Different Programming Languages-
Native apps are programmed to run on mobile devices, whereas PWA developers write PWAs to run inside a web browser. For each different platform native apps use different programming languages such as Objective C, Swift for iOS, and Java for Android, while PWA is programmed with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
Cost of Development-
Native apps-
Imagine building the same app on two different platforms such as iOS and Android with different programming languages for each. This means the cost of development for each platform will be high. Also, the maintenance cost and updates will require more money to keep the application stable and running.
PWAs-
PWAs are deployed by PWA developers on a web browser that can be accessed by any native platform user. This means PWAs are cost-efficient and will require only a few PWA developers for their maintenance and updates to keep PWAs up and running.
Distributions of Native apps and PWAs
Apart from developing native apps for different platforms with different programming languages, these native apps must be submitted to iOS App Store and Android Play Store for publication and distribution, but to distribute an app it has to pass certain criteria that are issued by the App Store and the Play store, only then the app will be considered for distribution.
PWAs however don’t have to rely on Application Stores on a different platform as it works from a web browser. The distribution of PWAs is easy and quick and doesn’t have to pass certain criteria to get distributed.
App Size
As native apps are distributed on different platforms for mobile devices the file size of an app varies for each platform. Also, the native apps have a large file size as they need to be installed on mobile devices.
PWA however only exists on a particular website that can be accessible by any mobile device user. PWAs are designed and programmed in small sizes as they are required to work on websites.
Discoverability of Native Apps and PWAs
Native apps are built to be distributed on App Store or Play store, hence the rank index of native apps on a website is poor. Furthermore, the rank of natives apps can only be optimized on different App stores for developers to use ASO- Application Search Optimization.
PWA developers deploy PWAs on websites and they use Search Engine Optimization for a better ranking index. Compared to normal pages PWAs are more responsive and provide an increased performance so a company can rank its website on the first page of results.
PWA vs SPA(Single Page Application)
Major Differences
Speed
SPA and PWA are much similar to each other and have almost the same speed while loading web pages, but the upper hand goes to PWA. The reason for this is that both SPA and PWA developers use JavaScript for development and creating service workers are not as much as SPA at the first time. SPA takes 5 to 10 seconds to load a page while PWA loads the same page within 1 to 3 seconds.
SEO(Search Engine Optimization)
One of the biggest disadvantages of SPA is its impact on SEO. As SPA uses AJAX for loading the content, the search bots get DOM elements with no content which negatively affects the search engine ranking of SPA.
On the other hand, PWA can optimize SEO with a server-side rendering for Google and other search engines by which pages can load full content in a short time, which allows crawlers to crawl more efficiently. This gives an edge to PWAs to rank in the first result pages.
UI/UX Interface
Both SA and PWA offer better UI and UX interfaces as they are both more advanced than a regular web application. However, PWA developers optimize PWAs which allows for reducing page load time providing smooth navigation and the best visual content.
Security
In SPA data endpoints are secured to have some security, but it is prone to be attacked by the hackers as it runs on JavaScript. As it doesn’t perform code compilation in JavaScript it makes SPA more vulnerable to malware.
PWA is more Secure as it runs under the HTTPS protocol, which assures that there will be no vulnerabilities for malware attacks.
How to Find and Hire PWA Developers
Know Your Project Requirements
You need to figure out what are your project’s requirements and accordingly, you need to decide what qualities are you expecting from PWA developers. Having a better understanding of your project requirements and creating a job description will ease the process of finding the right PWA developers.
Reach out to Job Sites
After knowing the project’s requirements and creating the job description, you can reach out to recruitment sites such as LinkedIn where you can find a bunch of great PWA developers that meet your profile and criteria.
Conduct interviews
After shortlisting candidates construct a list of professionals with the required skills and experience, and afterward analyze their likelihood of successfully contributing to your project needs. Here you need to consider candidates’ projects and their roles and responsibilities. Conduct interviews and onboard the right PWA developer who meets your criteria.
PWA Tutorials and Courses
Here are some PWA tutorials and courses which can come in handy to train your candidates-
• Progressive Web Apps Training- PWA, Google training program.
• Progressive Web Apps- The PWA Masterclass -Udemy.
• Progressive Web Apps(PWA)- The Complete Guide – Udemy.
Platform That Can help you find PWA Developers
When it comes to remote hiring Optymize does all the heavy lifting for you to provide the best suited PWA developers. Optymize provides a two-week trial period for new customers. Our platform focuses on making remote hiring easy by connecting you with the best PWA developers from around the world.
LinkedIn provides both on-site as well as Remote Developers around the world and it is the top recruiting platform worldwide. The main benefit of the LinkedIn platform is that companies can review CVs and can look into connections and hire best-suited PWA developers accordingly.
PWA Developer Salary
As the demand for PWAs surges, more and more companies are looking forward to hiring PWA developers. The average salary of PWA developers ranges from 5 to 7 lakhs Rupees in India and the UK the median salary of a PWA developer ranges from 60k-62k Euros. Considering the demand for PWA developers the salaries are also expected to grow shortly.
Conclusion
PWAs are in demand as many companies are looking to make their website more responsive and efficient, as demand for PWAs is soaring so does the demand for PWA developers, and hiring PWA developers can get hard as companies have to look for the best-suited developers with the right technical skills. With the help of this article, you will get a brief idea of how to find and hire PWA developers.
