How Long Does It Take To Develop PWA In Magento 2 Websites?
In recent surveys, online store traffic is rapidly shifting from desktop to mobile, accounting for more than 50% of total user sessions. However, existing technologies neither provide shoppers with positive and pleasant experiences (e.g.: mobile webs) nor satisfy merchants' budget (e.g.: mobile apps). That's why Progressive Web App appears and immediately becomes a hot topic. It combines the app-like interactions with the discoverability and reach of the web to deliver a much better shopping experience. Realizing the power of this technology, more and more owners decide to integrate PWA in Magento 2 stores. However, they do concern about the time to market of a Progressive Web App. If it takes a too long time to launch, the customers can't wait.
Your Selected Solution Will Determine The Time It Takes To Build PWA In Magento 2
For native apps, you might have to invest at least 6 months for the development process. For Magento 2 Progressive Web App, the time for development can be reduced since only one codebase is needed.
Up to now, there are 3 common solutions to implement PWA in Magento 2 websites, including Magento 2 PWA extension installation, PWA integration using ready-made PWA themes and PWA development using Magento 2 PWA Studio. Each of these approaches requires a different amount of time that will be discussed below:
It can take only a few hours...
if you just want to utilize a Magento 2 PWA extension. It's easy to find some PWA modules for Magento 2 using popular search engines. After having those extensions installed, your website might have some basic features of Progressive Web App such as add to homescreen, offline mode, and push notification.
If you want to build a Magento PWA with full features and stable performance, this might not be a good option.
Moreover, most of the available PWA extensions are highly dependent on Google's Service Worker and APIs that are not developed to serve Magento websites only. Therefore, there are many constraints when using those modules compared to the Magento PWA Studio tools officially introduced by Magento.
2-3 months...
is the needed time for developing your PWA based on Magento 2 Progressive Web App themes.
For example, Tigren provides a Magento 2 PWA theme combining a ready-made PWA storefront and core API (to cohere the PWA storefront with Magento backend). That theme was built on the foundation of Magento 2 PWA Studio, ReactJS, and GraphQL. To apply this theme, Tigren's team will customize the storefront to look like your existing website design as well as update the API if your site has some custom functions.
Since the huge time for developing the base storefront and API is eliminated, your total time of PWA development is down to 2-3 months only.
Or up to 6 months...
if you hire PWA developers/ Magento agencies to build your Progressive Web App from scratch in spite of using Magento 2 PWA Studio. The demo of Magento PWA Studio (Venia) is very basic and optimized for mobile only, you will have to customize it a lot to work on both desktop and mobile, as well as have full e-commerce functions. Also, you must develop the API, which might consume several months.
Below is the comparison between Venia PWA default theme and a ready-made PWA solution by Tigren:
Final Words
Depending on your business's financial ability and time budget that you can select the most potential Magento PWA integration solution for your business. From my point of view, 2-3 months might be acceptable, which is enough to develop a qualified Progressive Web App and not too long. In the e-commerce industry, time is money, the pioneers always have significant advantages so you should start your Magento 2 PWA development project as soon as possible!
