Why My First Cache‑First PWA Crashed on 4G and the 9‑Step Fix I Built for Dhaka Sellers
AI-generated illustration 🚌 Try it yourself — Bus Fare Calculator BD This case study is based on a real, live product. Check it out below. Get Bus Fare Calculator BD → It was 9 pm on a rainy Tuesday. My client, a tiny apparel shop on Daraz, sent a panicked screenshot: the “Add to Cart” button never responded for users on 3G. Their conversion rate dropped from 4.2% to 1.1% overnight. I stared at the service‑worker console, heart thudding. The site was a brand‑new PWA that I had set to cache‑first for everything – HTML, CSS, images, even API calls. My gut told me the strategy was sound, but the numbers screamed otherwise. The Hidden Problem Most Bangladeshi freelancers ship a cache‑first manifest because it looks safe. “Everything is cached, the user never sees a network hiccup,” we tell ourselves. The reality? Rural users on 3G/4G have tiny data caps and intermittent latency. When the service worker grabs a huge bundle (2 MB of fonts, 1.5 MB of product JSON) and tries to serve ...