FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Where are the plugin settings?

The only settings exposed are the HTTPS toggle on the general options screen. Otherwise, the plugin re-uses core settings. It uses your site icon as the icon in the web app manifest, and it uses your site title as the name. You can enable offline browsing in the Reading settings of the WordPress admin.

What is the plugin for?

The PWA plugin is primarily a set of APIs which are being iterated on to propose for integration into WordPress core. Themes and plugins can then integrate with the APIs to tailor the PWA experience for a given site.

We’re still looking at what makes sense to include in a default set of functionality, but one such extension plugin you should check out is this “Basic Site Caching” extension for the PWA plugin. It enables a network-first caching strategy for your site and ensures that the assets and uploaded files will be available offline as well. (Update: See pwa-wp#265 for the proposal to make this part of the plugin by default.) This has now been implemented. Read more about offline browsing.

Why am I getting a Lighthouse PWA audit warning about a missing short_name?

The short_name will reuse your site title if it is 12 characters or less 12 characters or less. If your site title is longer than this, then it will omit the short_name and Lighthouse will warn about it being empty. While the plugin may add a UI to supply a short name, in the mean time this can be supplied via some PHP filter code that you put in a custom plugin or your custom theme's functions.php:

add_filter( 'web_app_manifest', function( $manifest ) {
    $manifest['short_name'] = 'Shortness';
    return $manifest;
} );