The concept of Progressive Web Apps came into being in 2015 and since then it has been making news because of its benefits, functionality, and technological edge. Developed by Google, the idea was to create websites that feel like apps so that businesses don’t have to buy ecommerce android apps specifically.
What are progressive web apps (PWAs)?
Businesses can leverage a plethora of benefits by implementing a PWA on their existing website. Some of them are offline functionality, improved SEO performance, and push notifications to name a few.
The enhanced page speed and lower bounce rates, in particular, positively affect the website rankings. In comparison to conventional websites, the PWAs work in an advanced manner by acting as a layer between the website and the internet connection, routing all browser requests through a script known as a Service Worker. It then displays the desired results depending on a wider set of parameters than a regular website, thereby making it accessible offline.
Does Google crawl Progressive Web App sites?
PWAs make use of JavaScript, which means Google sees the single published page as a JavaScript site. You can create a new URL, so the Googlebot will now crawl the page just like it would do for any other published page.
In short, Google does crawl PWA sites just like it would crawl JavaScript or AJAX, but there are some issues that can impact the ‘crawlability factor, so developers need to be aware of all these technicalities. Make sure you choose a reliable pwa app development company for this job.
Google’s recommended SEO practices for Progressive Web Apps
After launching PWA, Google provided a detailed update on how Google handles Progressive Web Apps and JavaScript sites. Some of the important recommendations are listed below:
- Use rel=canonical when serving content from multiple URLs so that you don’t violate content duplicity norms.
- Try to avoid AJAX-Crawling schemes on new sites.
- Don’t cloak to Googlebot. Also, remember that the developer uses the feature detection and progressive enhancement technique, so all users will have access to the content.
- Googlebot will not index URLs containing “#” which means the search engines may drop everything beyond that #. It is better to use traditional SEO techniques.
Test to see how Googlebot sees your page and you can use Google Search Console for this. - Try to slash the number of embedded resources in the page (the number of JavaScript files required to render the page), since these might not be completely loaded.
To sum up
These are exciting times for online businesses to leverage the benefits of PWAs which are much cheaper and easier to maintain. If you are willing to transform your business, then consider investing in PWA.
In case you have any concerns or queries regarding this, you can always connect with us. At Sortd, we not only deliver flawless PWA services but also make sure that each of our clients fully understands the potential of this powerful platform and takes informed decisions in this regard. Apart from using the best mobile cross-platform framework, we help businesses make the most out of the latest technology
