In-Memory Caching for Progressive Web Applications
More than having a website, a company must ensure that this website delights users. Quick loading times and responsive elements are just a few of the things that will help a business deliver its promise of an excellent customer experience each time.
Today’s businesses rely heavily on a well established online presence. In today’s digital landscape, a well built website and social media channels are taken as proof of a legitimate business. While these are not objective metrics to determine the legitimacy of a business or its track record of success, for consumers it’s a way to gauge if a certain brand or company can consistently provide the products or services they need.
As such, company websites have become a vital part of any organization’s digital assets. Ensuring that the company’s website runs smoothly and provides what consumers want as quickly and efficiently as possible is of paramount importance. The rise in online transactions worldwide makes ecommerce a very lucrative channel now and in the coming years.
More than having a website, a company must ensure that this website delights users. Quick loading times and responsive elements are just a few of the things that will help a business deliver its promise of an excellent customer experience each time. Brands need to roll out optimized, personalized online experiences customers expect—or risk losing them.
Speed is a major factor that affects how many visitors a website gets, and whether or not these visitors will come back. Website and application developers use different methods to decrease website loading times and ensure website elements are responsive. In-memory caching allows shared elements on a webpage to be “closer” to the user by downloading them to and storing them in a device’s main memory.
This makes it quicker and easier to retrieve them because it could be done without the need to repeatedly query the web server. Used properly and according to application requirements, caching reduces server load and lowers consumption of server resources.
How Caching Helps Marketers
Success in today’s ecommerce landscape is dependent on how fast a company can deliver what the customers want. With the number of businesses competing for the very short attention span of customers, it can be challenging to remain relevant in their eyes—unless you find a way to stay in their eyes or on the top of their minds. The best way to do this is to infiltrate the one thing that almost never leaves their hands: their mobile devices.
Providing the best experience on mobile will help businesses reach out to and engage with the majority of its customers, since 60% of traffic now comes from mobile devices. Since users can now use mobile devices to surf the web and even shop online, the increase in traffic means millions of requests being sent to the web server. High network consumption combined with high CPU utilization could cause the server to crash, leading to slowdowns or even interruption of service.
An in-memory cache can help address this by caching and organizing all new requests so data fetch operations to and from the disk are minimized. This way, the CPU only needs to process requests that aren't already in the caching database.
Ultimately, caching will help boost application performance, reduce website loading times, and optimize costs. There's no need to purchase extra RAM with a caching solution in place because a cache will help increase server uptime for better application stability. Improving the customer experience will increase conversion rates and help businesses retain old customers.
Caching and Progressive Web Apps
Any forward-thinking business should consider the viability of all marketing channels, including ecommerce. Today, ecommerce has gone beyond the typical online store due to the rise in mobile usage; to leverage the rising number of mobile transactions, some have turned to progressive web apps, a relatively new technology that presents an opportunity for increasing engagement and conversions.
A progressive web app (PWA) is essentially a web application that uses the latest technologies to deliver an experience similar to that provided by a native app. Ultimately, the goal is to bring consistency between web and native apps so that a PWA can eventually replace both with a single instance.
Native apps have historically provided a richer user experience than mobile websites, which helped increase user engagement. A progressive web app is often faster than both a web and native app, can send push notifications, and can even work offline. It essentially improves engagement by going one step further than the web cache and storing frequently used data in the mobile cache, much closer to the user.
Businesses should consider making progressive web apps a part of their core strategy if they are to stay relevant in the digital business landscape. Below are a few reasons why.
- Increased conversion rates
Naturally, a better user experience will lead to higher conversion rates. Help the users achieve their goals, and they will help the business achieve theirs.
- Performance in an instant
Today’s users are extremely demanding and are always looking for instant gratification. A delay of a few seconds can mean a lost customer or prospect. Progressive web apps are designed to be fast and nimble; they leverage on the benefits of client-side caching to provide fast and smooth user experiences.
- Increased adoption and user engagement
A progressive web app allows users to “install” on their mobile device’s home screen for quick and easy access. This process is as simple as visiting a web link and accepting a prompt. By behaving like a native app, the website transforms into an actual app in the user’s perspective, helping increase adoption and engagement. Push notifications are another way of engaging with users even though they’re not currently using the progressive web app.
Why use Progressive Web Apps
Mobile phones and devices have arguably changed the way consumers shop and browse the web. As such, providing immersive user experiences is key, and this can be done through the combination of a powerful website or online store with a nimble progressive web app.
As demand for instant loading times, highly engaging experiences, and easy access to information continues to increase, integrating the progressive web app into the core strategy of a business becomes more vital and urgent by the moment.