Recently, Forbes.com announced they are relaunching their mobile experience as a progressive web app. They said that this is part of a year-long effort to re-brand their entire mobile experience. They are implementing two key features. First, they are adopting accelerated mobile pages, or AMP. Second, the new mobile experience is a progressive web app.

AMP and progressive whereabouts can work together. If you are familiar with accelerated mobile pages, it is a recommendation the Google search engine folks created about two years ago. It is outside the scope of this article, but we plan on publishing resources very soon.

Early Positive Signs of Progressive Web Apps

Forbes has been beta testing the new progressive web app experience with a small subset of users. These are really test show two significant key performance indicator improvements. First, power users spend twice as long on the site as before. And casual users are spending about three times as long on the site as they did before.

First, let’s get the technology out of the way. We spent months implementing best practices for mobile page performance across both iOS and Android phones. An m.forbes.com web page completely loads in 0.8 seconds, considerably faster than nearly all other sites and lightning fast compared to our current mobile site. In geek speak, our new mobile site is also a Progressive Web App, meaning it meets certain Google specifications and can be installed on Android phones faster than native apps on iPhones. The PWA is also tied to Google AMP pages, but that’s inside tech for coders only. Our new mobile site looks and feels app-like (on both iOS and Android phones), with gesture-based navigation and much more. When installed on Android phones, consumers can get push alerts and other app-familiar features.

For a site like Forbes, which use a news site, time on site in time on page are very key performance indicators. These statistics are used to help them sell advertising inventory.The time on site improvements could be associated directly with the progressive web app upgrade, but it may also have to do with improved user experience.

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