Progressive Web Apps, one year later

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is a technology collection that allows you to install websites on devices, so it behaves similar to a mobile application. The number of mobile device users is growing, and PWA implementation is becoming more important than ever.

Since implementing PWA on our homesite and system sites in January 2022, OIT has noticed a huge surge in traffic on both sites. The graph below shows how the servers' monthly traffic exceeded limits in both February and March. According to the data from OIT, the page views for our homesite almost doubled. They jumped from around 9.5 million views in January to around 18.07 million views in February. To mitigate the traffic surge and other related concerns on the servers, OIT put both sites behind a service called Cloudflare. Cloudflare serves up cached pages, and the site visits do not count against views in the servers. This helps OIT control traffic and stay below the monthly limits. Without this Cloudflare technology implementation, all PWA interactions, including the offline events, would be logged as views.

University Relations’ analytics report for the first half of 2022 showed the following results on the homesite after PWA implementations:

• Overall, new sessions increased by 3.6% from the previous year.
• The homepage saw a 5.1% increase in pageviews and 0.8% increase in unique pageviews.
• The Majors and Programs page saw the highest increase of change in pageviews, 68.1%, and unique pageviews, 8.8%, and the highest percent of mobile pageviews, 6.9% more than the next highest page.

Homesite landing pages:

• Exit rate for all pages decreased, meaning people continued to explore the website after visiting these pages, as the website design intended.
• Majors and Programs saw the greatest change in exit rate, a decrease of 34.5%.
• Average time on page for all pages decreased, meaning people were able to more quickly locate the link to their next page of interest.

Progressive Web Apps produce great results and present a unique chance to offer a fantastic web experience to your users.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about PWAs, email us at urweb@umn.edu.

Note: After analyzing the Google Analytics data used for the homepage and landing pages on this blog, we determined that we have insufficient Google Analytics tracking of the PWA to provide insights into the current usage of our PWA. To address this, we plan to publish a follow-up post on PWA in the future, utilizing a different analytics method to provide accurate results.