How to Convert a Website into an App

However, native mobile apps aren’t the only mobile solution that businesses go for — it can be either Progressive Web Application or a website with a responsive design.

In this article, we’ll talk about each of the 3 options, give you some advice on when it might be more suitable to use a certain solution, and walk you through every detail that you might need to know when converting your website into an app.

So, if you want to convert your website into an app or other mobile solution — keep on reading for more details!

❓ FAQ on Website to Mobile App Conversion

Before we give you some detailed information on how this process can look like, we’d like to cover certain questions that you might have. Thus, you’ll have a brighter picture of what converting a website into an app actually is.

In this section, we review rather common cases. Surely, it’s possible that your use case will benefit from a different approach. So, if you’d like to have detailed feedback on your specific case, feel free to reach out to us. We’d be happy to help you!

What Are The Converting Options? What Might Be the Cost? 🔄

To begin with, the Internet is full of “turn a website into an app with a few clicks” offers. Such options actually exist — let’s call them autoconverters.

These autoconverters can be divided into 2 categories:

1. The first one just takes your Website, places it into a WebView-wrapper inside the app, and emulates the navigation along with the behavior of a native app. Think about it, as if your website would open up via your mobile browser and get tweaked a bit to look more like an app.
2. The second category of autoconverters is for website-owners, who use popular engines like WordPress, Shopify, Wix, etc. These services have developed plugins for those engines, which provide an API for converting. Additionally, they offer a mobile app template that interacts with the API for data exchange and displaying.

📱 Mobile Apps Vs. PWAs

Basically, ,apart from a mobile (native) app, there are 2 more options for providing a user-friendly experience for mobile users — a PWA and responsive web design.

In this section, we’re going to cover the difference between a native app and a Progressive Web App, give you some examples, and go into detail about what a PWA basically is.

💻 Responsive Web Design

Another way of providing a sustainable mobile user experience is by making your website’s design responsive (or mobile-friendly if you wish).

Actually, if you have a lot of traffic from mobile searches, we’d say that a mobile-friendly design is something rather necessary. It’s because nowadays Google’s algorithms favor responsive web platforms.

In a nutshell, Google gives responsive websites higher positions for mobile searches. Meaning that not depending on how high-quality the content on your website is, it can be ranked high for mobile searches unless it’s not optimized for it.

You can find more details in Google’s guide on this topic and run a test to check if your website is mobile-friendly. That is, even high-quality web platforms can’t be high-ranked for mobile searches if they’re not optimized for mobile devices.

So, to help you improve your Google positions for 5,27B mobile users’ searches, we’d like to give you a couple of tips on how to make your website responsive.

Consistency: All Eyes on UI

“Less is more” is a key principle when it comes to mobile development. Web pages usually contain many buttons, text blocks, and other visual elements. Moving all these objects in the application without any changes is an unattainable luxury.

Screen sizes, proportions, and resolutions of mobile devices put you in the position where you have to decide what elements will remain on the front line, and which will go to the background.

To make that visible, you can:

• Make it of a different, contrast color, compared to the background.
• Place it in a geometric figure.
• Use distinct font.
• Make it bold or cursive & others.

🛠 How Can React Native Be Useful in Converting a Website to an iOS App (or Android one)?

React Native is a mobile app development framework from Facebook based on the JavaScript web programming language. Its main difference from native approaches is that you can create a single codebase using JavaScript, 70-80% of which can be reused for both iOS and Android apps at once. At Stormotion, we use it a lot.

Even though your developers will still have to write some platform specifications, React Native app development services can greatly decrease development time and costs as well as lower the price of further post-release support of both applications.

Therefore, if you want to convert a website into an Android app and an iOS app at the same time (or ensure faster development for the second platform in the future), we’d recommend you consider hiring for React Native mobile developers.

💡 Takeaways

In conclusion, we’d like to say that converting a website into an app isn’t actually converting since there’s no such thing that can automatically rebuild the website into an app with a code.

To have a sustainable solution, you most likely will have to opt for a custom mobile development. However, if you already have a web product, it’ll be easier for you to build an application.

Let’s briefly review the main highlights of the article:

1. Define which parts of your service customers expect to see in your App and focus on these, rather than copycatting your website.
2. Decide on whether you’ll use an autoconverter or develop a custom app.
3. Pay attention to the UX differences between Web and Mobile and consider using React Native to deliver apps for both platforms at once.

If you need any help with converting your website into a sustainable solution optimized for mobile devices that will fully meet your mobile audience’s needs, feel free to contact us. We’d be happy to help you!