Are You Ready? Our PWA Bracket Challenge Is Here!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year...well, for us Hoosiers it is! We’re in full swing of this year’s March Madness tournament, and whether your bracket is totally busted from this year’s fair share of upsets or you’re riding high at the top of your office’s tournament, there’s no doubt that we love a little friendly competition. Which is exactly why we wanted to bring that spirit of springtime competition to something we here at Lumavate care about a lot...Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)! As consumers are growing needier for fast, instantly accessed mobile experiences, brands are turning to PWAs to deliver. They’re fast, app-like mobile experiences that don’t require a download–making them perfect for today’s on-the-go consumers. 

With a laundry list of UX benefits, and some pretty great returns for businesses who have implemented them, we thought it would be fun to put some of our favorite PWAs head to head in a little March Madness inspired competition. So, here it is...the first annual PWA Bracket Challenge!

These 16 PWAs are going head to head in four fast-paced, competitive rounds–each based on a different Lighthouse Audit category (check out our Whiteboard Wednesday video for a quick recap on what exactly that audit tests for!): 

Sweet 16: Best Practices Score We’ll start with the Sweet 16 competing on Google’s Lighthouse Best Practices scores, which are based on 16 best practice audits. 

Elite 8: Performance Score The Elite 8 will be challenged on Performance scores, which are based on a weighted average of various performance audits.

Final 4: First Meaningful Paint (FMP) The Final 4 will go head-to-head on First Meaningful Paint (FMP), or the time in which it takes the page to populate the primary content of the page. This round is all about speed, so may the fastest PWA win! 

Championship: PWA Lighthouse Score The big game comes down to the PWA scores, which tests for technical requirements that make PWAs have all of that rich UX functionality. 

Try out the 16 PWAs for yourself using the links below (make sure you’re on mobile!), and hop over to Twitter to let us know which ones you think will progress on to the next round. We’ll be back on Thursday with our Elite 8! In the meantime...may the best PWA win! (Now as a quick disclaimer...we want this competition to be fair and unbiased, so we're not including any Lumavate-powered PWAs in our bracket, since we already know that our platform is designed to produce amazing results across all Lighthouse criteria! You can rest easy knowing that this bracket is based solely on Lighthouse scores, and is safe from any hometeam bias.)

• Alibaba
• The Weather Channel
• Starbucks
• Fandango
• Lancome
• Forbes
• Lyft
• Flipboard
• Twitter
• Virgin America
• The Washington Post
• Uber
• Trivago
• Instagram
• Lilly Pulitzer
• West Elm