BookMyShow is India’s largest ticketing firm, with 50+ million monthly visitors. They developed an improved version of their mobile website using a Progressive Web App (PWA), delivering an 80+% increase in conversions, which means more users purchasing tickets.
Since launching our PWA, we’ve seen an exponential increase in mobile conversion rates. The PWA helped us connect with more people on mobile — and it's mobile users who make up the majority of our overall audience.
Sahil Tewari, Assistant General Manager, Mobile & Web
- BookMyShow's PWA drove an 80%+ increase in their conversion rates.
- The size of the PWA is 54x smaller than the Android app and 180x smaller than the iOS app.
- The PWA takes less than 2.94 seconds to load and enables checkout within 30 seconds.
Challenges
BookMyShow has a growing mobile audience. Over 85% of transactions happen on mobile, and the company’s mobile web traffic recently overtook their desktop web traffic. Even with this growth in traffic, the company still encountered high bounce rates because their mobile website's load speed and user experience weren’t optimal.
Their native app also posed problems as it required heavy data and memory usage to be effective. “People were using the native app and were happy with it, but their main concerns were the data usage and the memory it consumes,” says Anish Tripathi, Vice President of Design. “And if they uninstalled the app and tried using the mobile browser, it didn’t work the same way.”
Solution
Knowing that speed and efficiency are key to a good ticket-buying experience, BookMyShow launched a PWA to deliver the best mobile web experience possible to the majority of their users. A PWA would provide a smooth, seamless movie- booking experience that would optimize speed and remove data constraints for existing customers, without sacrificing the user experience.
The shift to a PWA also gave BookMyShow the opportunity to simultaneously migrate away from their PHP backend stack, which involved redoing some core development work. They adopted cutting-edge solutions and built a truly powerful, technically-advanced web app that provides users with fast, reliable, and engaging experiences just like the native app.
The PWA is optimized for speed. The goal for the app—which took only 10 months to build—was created to enable checkout within 30 seconds. They were also excited to use the “add to home screen” feature to provide a native-app like experience. Their PWA application is only about 440KB — 54 times smaller than the Android app and 180 times smaller than the iOS app. BookMyShow also took advantage of service workers to deliver reliable performance on slow or unreliable networks. Data consumption is also substantially lower, thanks to optimization. When a user asks for a particular page, only assets required for that page are loaded, conserving data. On 2G networks, the initial load time is just 4 seconds. Even for personalized movie suggestions, the PWA takes less than 2.94 seconds in subsequent loads. All of these changes resulted in an 80+% increase in conversion rates, a huge difference in BookMyShow’s bottom line.