Progressive Web Application: What is it?

In this blog, we will be covering what is a Progressive Web Application? Now, what is? Is the series where I give you a basic overview of various web topics allowing you to dive in more and figure out a little bit more about how this stuff works and what it is?

So in this blog, we are going to be talking all about Progressive Web Application and If you Google what Progressive Web Application is? It’s literally the first link that comes up.

Now, what is the Progressive Web Application? Because if you look at this thing, it says that it’s reliable, fast, and engaging ok! That does tell you a whole lot. It gives you a little bit more in the paragraph’s right? It’s explaining some of the stuff. But if you would have read the paragraphs, it doesn’t necessarily give you very concrete information as to what exactly a Progressive Web Application is? And in the most plain English way of describing it will be – A Progressive Web Application is an application that’s built and lives on the web but would function in more and more like a need of an application.

Now, what kind of things that make it function like a need of application well! That’s where basically it’s interesting and a lot of these things called to be found in this checklist. So here at the very top, there is a Progressive Web Application checklist and it would go ahead into basically give you all of the requirements for what a Progressive Web Application needs to be?

Not only that but also there is this Lighthouse that they have which is a chrome extension or an application. I think it’s just a website itself. Yeah, chrome development tool. This is primarily how I run which is basically an audit for your site to tell you what stuff you need to modify on your site?

So before we get into this checklist just take a look why you would want a Progressive Web Application. Some of the answers that are going to come from this checklist are itself but really a Progressive Web application is going to function much more like a normal application and this becomes way more important on a phone however it can also form on the desktop. As I believed the latest version of windows actually supports for Progressive Web Application to be installed on your desktop. Now when you hit a Progressive Web Application it’s going to ping you in the browser and say ‘Hey! Would you like to install this as an application?’

And now in Android, it’s installed in your app drive and Android functions very much like an application. But to function as an application you do need to check for some of these things and these are going to be a real requirement. For instance, it needs to be https as you did in the SSL certificate you can use one of those free SSL encrypts that or if you are running on a server you need it. No fun to do as SSL many services like Next.JS, hosting platforms may work easily with SSL.

So depends on the answer of your environment, how you get an SSL certificate but, to be honest, you shouldn’t be paying for one of these points because let’s encrypt can get you one for free.

Next, we have pages responsive on tablets and mobile devices a.k.a. this thing needs to be responsive and it needs to look good on all the devices no matter what ok?

Next all application URLs need to load when offline. This one might trick you up because how many times have we really thought about offline, as per developers?

And as people use their phones everywhere so sometimes you just want to put up an application you might not have either faster Ethernet or you might not have internet at all. And think about your other applications, if your application doesn’t need to be interfacing with the internet at that given point, well! A normal app is going to load just fine; it removes all the cached version of data.

So a Progressive Web Application needs to function like that and here what’s great about this checklist is that it gives you how to fix user service worker so you can just read here a little bit more about service workers.

So the meditative provided to add to the home screen this is the thing that allows you to be installed on your home screen which is the ‘add a web application manifest file’, which includes things like information about the application the icon that is going to be used when it’s on your application. So you want to click on this ‘add a web application manifest file’. Manifest file you need to work on this.

Loads: –

A first load fast even on 3G again this is going to be important one overall for a lot of things than non -Progressive Web Application. You don’t want to constantly be improving your site. Even use the performance tools inside of chrome or relative tools maybe I should do a series on this. You want to read a blog on series on chrome developer tools. Let me know because there is so much stuff there specially for implementing in performance.

But you can see here a time to first bit of time to first point on your page is important. So you don’t want to bump up on that point speed by either lazy loading image, a code splitting server side rendering there is a ton of things that you can do to decrease that initial first load speed.

Or decrease the initial load time not speed. The next thing is Word cross browser again fixes issues when it is rendering edge Firefox, safari, and chrome.

So this is should be given anyways. It should be doing this one-up page transitions don’t feel like they block the work. So basically using things like skeleton screens just think about using applications and how applications function just in general how they feel. This is how a Progressive Web Application should be.

Now each page should have a URL to make sure that all client – side browser can be reconstructed from the mistakes given in the URL. So basically this is easy with modern technology, React router and stuff like that where you are basically able to manipulate the page. Your URL will be on the front end and make sure that every single page is differently linked ok! So again this one is should be given, you know page transitions if you are doing page transitions or loading failed then the screen is going to take a little bit of work and a cross browser again should be given first load fast should be given and regardless they kind of special stuff in here is going to be the use of service workers.

The web – app manifest file and https are really in use can do those things you can have yourself a Progressive Web Application and so there are just the benchmarks ok!

An addition to this example for Progressive Web application checklist and this is a lot of extra stuff.

Site contact is in index ok! Schema .org metadata provided WordPro appropriate social metadata provided word appropriate, canonical URL’s are provided when necessary.

Pages use the history API all right, so this one again should be pretty easy about this modern tech. Content doesn’t jump after the page load. So these are a lot of really interesting things my recommendations to come here and study this but more importantly to install all the lighthouse extensions and run it on your app. OK!

So check it out again in what you want to be doing in grabbing Lighthouse. You want to read through this entire your checklist again the baseline stuff is the stuff that you need to worry about and the extra stuff again this stuff is only going to make your site better and better. So this is really important to see what a Progressive Web application is? And if you do at least all of the things in the baseline your application would be allowed to be installed on someone’s homes screen just like a real application and as long as you think about other it like building apps doesn’t understand a web or that are needed and that’s going to be the way your PWA can be the most functional on those terms right?

So check it out this is a PWA. It’s nothing special just a sort of a bunch of little things that add up to make your application a much more needed experience. So check it. PWA definitely something that is going to be way way better all the time. In the future so get to work and make your application a Progressive Web Application as always this is all about Progressive Web application.