One SEO professional was asking John Mueller during a hangout about their technology stack.
They saw their competitor changing to a PWA-based (progressive web application) website technology stack, and as a result of doing that, the competitor dramatically increased their rankings.
So, the SEO professional wants to do something similar.
Their overall question is whether or not they should be upgrading their technology to a PWA-based site, or maintain their existing technology?
John explained that he doesn’t believe there is one absolute answer to this.
With a PWA, on one hand, if it’s a pure JavaScript website, there are challenges you have to overcome in order to make sure that the site renders properly for Googlebot. If you don’t, then you may encounter problems with crawling, indexing, and ranking.
Just by default, saying you’re going to switch to PWA technology is not automatically going to make your website better.
There are also many other factors to consider. Things like your content, internal links, and other parts of your website that may stay the same. If you don’t touch these, then you’re probably not creating a better website.
But, if you have a 10 or 15 year old website, and you’re moving to a cleaner architecture, a better website technology stack, or a cleaner and faster website, depending on your market something like a progressive web app with additional features and functionality could be very valuable.
If you have to put in the extra effort to create a fully functional, JavaScript-based website, you have to think about whether that will work well in search and be fully crawlable and indexable. It could be worthwhile from a financial point of view to do that.
But, if you’re just doing it by itself, without doing anything else to improve your website, don’t expect your rankings to improve.
This happens at approximately the 52:48 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 7 52:48
Yeah. Hi, John. Yeah, so I have a PWA question, which is the normal tech stack., HTML, CSS, JS and one of our competitors. So as you explained in that question, we might be…there are, you know, the minimize the elements of the web pages, internal linking structure are improved and all. Those are the factors [that] could be [a] cause of the rankings into SEO.
But what is my intent behind the questions: overall [the] game is shifted toward the UI and UX, whatever [is] happening to the user front. Whenever the websites are open, or the rendering upon the browser. So when we are seeing [inaudible]. See, our website is a product website, and it’s a very old website.
You can say a 10 to 15 years ago website, it’s launched in 2005, 2006, like, a lot of the complex tech environment, you know, the title structure, back and front end a lot. So when we are to notice our competitors adopted the PWA from the last three, four months, and obviously they have minimized some of their HTML elements of their front pages, and some of the internal linking structure as well.
So we are just wondering, is it possible, the reason to be, because obviously PWA gives the user the best user experience in comparison to normal websites?
If I’m thinking in the right direction, so what could we, you know, the possible factor and how we can, you know, the, is it fine to go with the PWA or maintaining our current tech stack?
John 54:34
Thanks. Yeah. So, I think the question is kind of like you have an older website and your competitor just moved to a PWA. And, like, everything is better for them. Should we also move to PWA?
SEO Professional 7 54:49
Yeah, that’s a big decision for the management point of view also.
John 54:52
Yeah, I, I don’t think there is one one absolute answer. So I think on the one hand, with a PWA, if it’s a pure JavaScript based website, then you have some challenges there that are on top of just the normal website. And that’s everything around JavaScript based websites and making sure that they render well for search. That can be a lot of work.
And that can cause a lot of problems. So by default, saying going to a PWA will make your rankings better, I don’t think that is the case. It can improve your rankings if you make a better website. But you also have a lot of other things that you need to think about. So it’s something where essentially, from my point of view, it’s more of, well, is going to a new website going to improve my rankings?
And my guess is if your website is really 10, 15 years old, and has kind of grown organically since then, probably yes, probably yes. Like moving to any kind of a newer framework and a cleaner website, a faster website, one that works better for users, probably, after 10, 15 years you will see changes in ranking. And that doesn’t have to be a PWA. Maybe even going to PWA adds so much extra work that it’s not worthwhile for you. Maybe it is worthwhile.
I think one of the advantages of a PWA is also that you have some almost like mobile app-related elements that are kind of available by default, which could be like installing on the home screen, maybe some offline functionality. And depending on your market, maybe that’s really valuable. So that might be something that says, well, it’s extra work to make a JavaScript-based website work in search.
But we don’t have to create a separate app, or we have all of these extra features as well. And it’s worthwhile from a financial point of view to do that. But that’s something where almost the SEO aspect is secondary.
But especially if you have a large old website that’s 10, 15 years old, moving to something new, I’m almost certain that you will see significant changes just because it’ll be a lot cleaner, it’ll be a lot faster, the structure will be a lot better.
It’ll be better for users, it’ll be easier for search engines to understand all of that kind of every all of the HTML improvements that have happened since then they play in your favor.
SEO Professional 7 57:41
Alright, so what I’m getting from your explanation, I got the two points. First point, PWA is not directly relates with the [inaudible] and some of the ranking factors. And second point, you are telling, obviously the your product website needs to be updated with the latest tech stack, which is going to be helpful for the cleaning of overall structure and you know the HTML elements, which is rendering on the front end. Is it fine?
John 58:05
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t say that all websites have to be the most modern HTML. But if a website has kind of lingered on for the past 10 years, you’ve kind of missed out on a lot of improvements that have happened across the way.
SEO Professional 7 58:22
Got it. Got it. Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m going to my management [inaudible].
