Posted by Rahul Roy-chowdhury, VP Product
Management, Chrome
One of the virtues of the web is its
immense reach, providing access to information for all internet users regardless of device or
platform. With the
explosion of mobile devices, the web has had to evolve to deliver great experiences on the
small screen. This journey began a few years ago, and I am excited to be able to say that the
mobile web isopen for business. Join me live at Google I/O at 2:00pm PT
as I discuss the state of the union and how to take advantage of new experiences like AMP and Progressive
Web Apps (PWAs) to deliver a
best-in-class mobile experience.
If you don't have time to tune in today, we'll post the
recording shortly on our YouTube channel. In the
meantime, here's a quick recap of the four aspects to focus on while building a great mobile
web experience.
Accelerate
Expressiveness has always been a strength
of the web, but sometimes that expressiveness can come at the cost of loading time or smooth
scrolling. For example, event listeners allow developers to create custom scrolling effects
for their website, but they can introduce jank when Chrome needs to wait for any touch handler
to finish before scrolling a page. With the newpassive event listener API, we've given control back to the
developer, who can indicate whether they plan to handle the scroll or if Chrome can begin
scrolling immediately.
Speed also goes beyond user experience
gains. Studies have shown that 40% of users will leave
a retail site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. To get a blazing fast web page in
front of users immediately, we've introduced Accelerated
Mobile Pages (AMP). With AMP, we have seen pages load 4x faster and use up to 10x
less data. AMP is already seeing great adoption by developers, with more than 640,000 domains
serving AMP pages.
Engage
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) let developers take advantage of new
technologies to provide users with an engaging experience from the very first moment. Thanks
to a new API called service worker, all the important parts of a web app can be cached so that
it loads instantly the next time a user opens it. This caching also allows developers to
continue to provide a fast and meaningful experience even when the user is offline or on an
unreliable network. PWAs provide elements of polish too: an icon users can add to their home
screen, a splash screen when they open it, and a full-screen experience with no address
bar.
JalanTikus Progressive Web
App
Convert
Logging in is a ubiquitous pattern on the
web, but92% of usersabandon a
task if they've forgotten their password. To alleviate this pain, Chrome's password manager
enables more than 8-billion sign-ins per month, and we're expanding support with the
Credential Management API. Using this API allows web apps to more
closely integrate with the password manager and streamline the sign-in
process.
Even once logged in, checkout can be a complicated process to complete. That's
why we're also investing in capabilities such as the Web Payment
APIand enhanced autofill, assisting users by accurately filling in forms for them.
We've found that forms are completed 25% more when autofill is available, increasing odds for
conversion.
Retain
Once the first interaction with a user is
complete, re-engaging on the web can be tricky. Push notifications address this challenge on
native apps, and now thepush APIis available on the web as well. This
allows developers to reconnect with their users even if the browser isn't
running.Over 10 billion push notifications are
sent every day in Chrome, and it’s growing quickly. Jumia found
that users who enabled push notifications opened those notifications 38% of the time and
recovered carts 9x more often than other users.
Jumia Mobile Web Push
Notifications
Success Stories
As developers begin embracing these new technologies, we're
seeing success stories from around the world.AliExpress, one of the world's largest e-commerce sites, built a PWA and saw
conversion rates for new users increase by 104%. They've also found that users love the experience, spending 74% more time on their site per
session.
Another great
example isBaBe, an Indonesian
news aggregator service that was app-only until they developed a PWA with feature parity to
their native app. Since launching they have found it to perform even faster than their native
app, and have seen comparable time spent per session: 3 minutes on
average on both their mobile website and their native app.
Even developers who have only begun
implementing certain PWA technologies have seen success.United eXtra,
a leading
retailer in Saudi Arabia, implemented push notifications and saw users who opted-in returned
4x more often. These
returning users also spent 100% more than users returning from other
channels.
These are just a handful of businesses
that have begun reaping the benefits of investing in Progressive Web
Apps.Learn moreabout our how partners are using PWA
technologies to enhance their mobile web experience.
Subscribeto our
YouTube channel to stay up to date with all the mobile web sessions from Google I/O, which we
will continue to upload as they’re ready. Thanks for coming, thanks for watching, and most of
all, thank you for developing for the web!
