More than 80% of IT, R&D and marketing professionals across the UK, US and Australia think that apps could be over – believing that all forward-thinking organisations will be implementing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and PWA (Progressive Web Apps) within the next year.
The study by Vanson Bourne and WP Engine also finds that four in five (81%) think that development costs of a native mobile application are higher than for a PWA, while AMP was among the least expensive solutions to implement ($189,991 on average), requiring the shortest time and the fewest developers. Further, the development and maintenance for iOS and Android apps averages more than $1 million for respondents for two years. So, many are turning to AMP and PWA mobile solutions, which cost less than half over the same time period.
AMP, meanwhile, allows organisations to create websites in a straightforward way with an open-source library, giving the user a smooth, near instant load experience. PWA allows a user to save an icon to their home screen, much like a downloaded app, and although they’re on a website when using it, it functions like they’re using an app on their mobile device.
The top benefits anticipated included improved security (44%), increased traffic from mobile users (41%) and improved conversion rate (40%)
More speedy response times are also crucial, says the study. Two seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability, according to Akamai. Yet, only 17% of our respondents’ enterprises have an average website load time on mobile devices of under 2 seconds.
On average, it takes almost three and a half seconds for a page to load on a mobile device from respondents’ organisations’ websites. For the mobile user, this is simply unacceptable. And according to WP Engine’s own speed test calculation, a three and a half seconds delay means a typical organisation could miss out on an average of 40% of their revenue.
Mary Ellen Dugan, Chief Marketing Officer at WP Engine explains: “Consumers today aren’t just mobile first, they’re mobile only. Enterprise organizations are falling behind in terms of their ability to provide better, faster mobile experiences, putting themselves at great risk of losing customers and revenue. When you factor in the real cost savings and performance increases realized by using AMP and PWA on WordPress, the results speak for themselves. The increased use of these two mobile technologies is resulting in much better mobile experiences at less than half the cost of apps and providing demonstrable benefits to consumers and an enterprise’s bottom line.”
Image: Fotolia
