Your WordPress site can be an app
Every small business owner has thought about it: should we have an app? Then they hear the price, the timeline and the maintenance, and the idea quietly dies.
In Skopje I showed a cheaper route. A progressive web app turns your existing WordPress site into something people can install on their phone, use offline and get notifications from.
Three ingredients
HTTPS, which you should have anyway. A web app manifest, which tells the phone your app’s name, icon and colours. And a service worker, a small script that sits between your site and the network, caches what matters and keeps the site working when the connection drops.
WordPress makes it easier
There is a PWA feature plugin backed by WordPress contributors, and themes can add support directly. Push notifications can come from Firebase, OneSignal or SendPulse.
And if you still want the app store
Tools like PWA Builder can package your PWA for Android and other stores. Sign it, test it with Lighthouse and on real devices, and publish.
The idea was never to replace native apps. It was to give small businesses an option they didn’t know they had.
