Depending on your web application, a progressive web app may not be essential, but it may be useful to some of your users. Going PWA allows your users to save a subset of your website directly on their mobile device to be able to use it off-line.

All you need to make this work is that you site is HTTPS, a manifest.json file and to register a service working within your current application. With a little bit of time these can quite easily be created manually, however I am going to focus purely on using webpack as a means of integrating it with your existing build process. Similar approaches can be used with gulp/grunt.

Once setup your site will register as a PWA and on supporting mobile devices/browsers, users will even be prompted to save your app to their home screen, effectively installing it.