Settled aims to empower consumers so that finding, financing and selling a home is swift and straightforward. When the Settled team observed that the majority of users visiting their site were doing so on mobile devices, they prioritised finding a solution that would be fast, reliable and engaging for consumers.
Goals
Provide a quick, accessible and easy-to-use way to manage property transactions
Improve mobile site experience
Aproach
Adopted a mobile-first, offline-first approach using Progressive Web Apps
Results
Increased mobile transactions by 8%
Improved mobile conversions by 23%
Decreased mobile bounce rate by 13%
Reduced overall cost per conversion by 14%
3X reduction in data downloaded by users
3X reduction in page load times
“Improving page load times by almost threefold is huge! Thanks to the caching features of PWAs, our users are able to access their accounts with limited or no network connection in the blink of an eye. This is something that we feel gives us an edge over our competitors.”
– Dean Hume, CTO, Settled
“Our primary focus is growing the business, so we focus on homeowners listing their home for sale with us and all the steps leading up to this decision”, explains Dean Hume, CTO. “As a company, we knew that over 65% of our traffic comes via mobile devices and our users are always on the go. With 3G and 4G connections flaky at the best of times, we wanted to ensure that our users could access their information regardless of connection speed.”
With this in mind, Settled redesigned their home management system with a mobile-first, offline-first approach using Progressive Web Apps. Progressive Web Apps enable an app-like user experience on a mobile browser. Users can interact with mobile web pages that look, feel and function like an app. This includes push notifications, offline accessibility and a homescreen icon. Due to an on-device cache, the experience launches instantly even when the network connection isn’t stable.
This approach ensures that the onboarding stages of Settled’s website load swiftly for the mobile user. Once the user has signed up, the PWA experience helps them stay highly engaged. “One of the key features of PWAs is that they allow you to take web pages offline”, Dean says. “This is especially useful for our messaging system. Our users are able to access the entire site offline as well as view their messages to potential buyers and sellers.”
A host of success metrics demonstrate the wisdom of pursuing the PWA redesign. Today the Settled website is interactive within the first 3 seconds of loading, allowing users to move quickly to the point of action. According to Google Analytics data, mobile transactions have gone up by 8%, mobile conversions have increased by 23%, mobile bounce rates are down by 13% and overall cost per conversion has decreased by 14%.
“We looked at a few metrics including user engagement and page load times”, Dean continues. “Since switching to a PWA, our users have downloaded three times less data and we’ve managed to improve our subsequent page load times almost three times! We’re able to offer our users the same experience as a native application with one codebase, which in turn means we’re able to release features faster and build a great experience for our users across the board.”
