Gleecus Insights

In today’s digital and interconnected world, mobile phones have become an extension of our physical selves. Millennials who’ve grown up during the smartphone boom are used to quick access to information at their fingertips and have diminishing attention spans flitting from one idea to another in a matter of seconds.

The customer of today has evolved to expect such quickness and adaptability from the products that they choose to consume. According to Akamai, ‘2 seconds’ is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. Consumers have lost their patience with unoptimized and cluttered websites that take too long to load. However, almost  82% of enterprises have websites that have slow loading speeds on mobile (Higher than two seconds). These extra seconds add up to a lot of lost business.

Customers have come to expect high-speed, intuitive and pleasant mobile experiences as a given. More and more enterprises will have to up their game in the game for attention spans as performance expectations grow to be demanding as ever.

To enhance the digital experience and to allow organizations to create websites in a straight forward way, new mobile solutions like Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) have been introduced. Enterprises that leverage these tools will come out on top both in business and in the longevity of their brand.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source library that provides a straight forward way to create mobile-friendly websites. It gives users a smooth and near-instant loading experience. AMP is supported by many different platforms and is compatible across browsers. AMP’s ecosystem includes 25 million domains, 100+ technology providers and leading platforms that span the areas of publishing, advertising, e-commerce, local and small businesses and more.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is a software development methodology that is a hybrid of regular web pages (or websites) and a mobile application offering a lower maintenance cost when compared to Android and iOS apps. The majority (68%) of people believe that PWA could lead to the end of the app store.

Inculcating best practices from AMP and PWA development methodologies in many cases will help organizations achieve faster load time for their websites on mobile devices, ideally bringing the average load time down to under two seconds and providing a superior mobile experience.

Forward-thinking enterprises should be making considerable investments to capitalize on opportunities and to improve the digital experience for a consumer with an increasingly mobile-first and soon, mobile-only mindset.