Migrating to Progressive Web Application

Housing Go

Redesign of our mobile website provided us the opportunity to revamp the code base to push performance to the max. With the technological advancement and improved capabilities of modern browsers like Service Workers, IndexedDB, Add to Home Screen, Push Notifications, our aim was to make an app that is fast, performant and reliable.

Here’s how we mastered front-end performance for our progressive web app Housing Go.

Tech Stack and Tools

React with Redux

NodeJS with Express

Babel

Webpack

Server Architecture

Initial discussions revolved around using a subdomain like m.housing.com or mobile.housing.com, but that would have increased http redirects for a user and could have hampered our existing SEO rankings.

Finally we made a decision to resolve the request at Ngnix level using the user-agent string and then pass it to the eligible server.

We didn’t migrate our complete website and hence there are a few routes which are still being served from the desktop server, we catered to these by using our custom internal redirects.