“If you think math is hard, try web design.”
– Trish Parr (Ontario Website Designer, owner at eParrs)
The field of web development has progressed with the emergence of new technologies, lead to the development of dynamic websites and web app solutions. We have already steeped into 2021, and like each year, web development trends change, dictating new directions for business owners and web developers. All over the world more than 1.74 billion websites on the internet today. Each site differs through its concept and strategy, related to development, design, content, or digital marketing. But in the ocean of so many websites, how many seem to be following the latest web development trends?
The answer is 12.5%. For large companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Forbes, the implementation of Artificial Intelligence, Progressive web applications, Internet of Things isn’t new. But all businesses must recognize tendencies across industries and not ignore the changes technology brings to web development to compete on the same level with such giants.
Websites are the face of your business rather than mere codes. More than one-third of visitors prefer to stick to websites whose content and layout seem very attractive. In 2021, businesses are more willing to apply the latest web development trends for improving conversions and develop decent websites without having to code. If you want to stay ahead, it is necessary to focus on the latest trends, updates, techniques, and approaches, are becoming popular. Why developers should discover more innovative ways to web development - the fact is it helps businesses to grow rather exponentially and globally.
Making those facts paramount, here we have discussed the future web development trends to align your goals with the latest trends, techniques, and popular approaches and to stay ahead in the game.
1. Progressive web apps (PWA)
Progressive web apps are now bearing the flag of the future in the web development world. PWAs recreate the in-app experience within a browser and make things simple for developers than building native applications for every device. When you need to include personalization elements, building native mobile applications is a much longer process than building a traditional website. Hence you can develop your website as a PWA for a better customer experience on mobile rather than build two applications. PWA also offers cutting-edge functionalities that support interactive mode, responsive action, offline ways of working, app-like functions, and enable websites to load quickly.
This technology has made a revolution in client experience big time and becomes a top favorite of organizations that are in look of a mobile-first approach. Pinterest builds a PWA when they determined that they offered a slow website experience. Now visitors spent 40% more time on Pinterest’s PWA than its mobile website. It helps Pinterest to increase revenue by 44% and user engagement by 60%. Starbucks and Twitter also apply the same techniques for their websites.
Main Features-
Operations like native apps and user experience
Enhance reliability and availability
Easy to update and access
Increase conversion and customer engagement ratio
Faster page loading
2. AI in integrating solutions
According to Statista revenue from AI is expected to reach $126 billion in 2025 as many web development companies have started developing AI-enabled sites. Organizations are now applying AI in web development to predict customer choices shape the overall look and feel accordingly. AI also allows you to know customer future buying plan, who are interested in buying your products, products that customer likes and dislike and others sales-related queries. AI-based equipment and machines like facial identification, pattern identification set to lesson daily errors, boost productivity, speed, and agility.
E-commerce businesses are going towards seamless AI adoption based on voice search, etc. For example, YouTube applies NLP to create subtitles from the audio of a video automatically. Google Analytics also applies ML to understand the behavior of website users.
Main Features-
Personalized content and good user experience
Voice search optimization
Deep learning, facial recognition
Quantum and cloud computing
Chatbots and AI-powered assistance
3. New experiences with AI Chatbots
After the worldwide pandemic, we saw immense usage of chatbots and how well organizations are now realizing the importance of chatbots. Till its usage has been restricted under answering the initial questions and redirecting to a company person, but the coming year will hopefully see a generous use of this functionality. Chatbots are the blended solutions of voice/speech recognition technique and cognitive intelligence, replacing human support on websites.
Chatbot offers human-to-human interaction using natural language processing (NLP). Most web development projects are preferring chatbots to handle their sales support systems. For example, Swelly is the most famous Facebook messenger chatbot. The eBay chatbot is the most advanced e-commerce chatbot out there.
Main Features-
Conversational maturity quotient
Emotionally intelligent and independent
Pre-trained, secure, and prompt in answering
Performs complicated reasoning
Can converse easily across multiple channels
4. Voice related to commerce and navigation
In 2021 the bridge between technology and humans is getting closer with the voice-related functionalities like voice enabling, voice search engine optimization, voice commerce. According to recent research 8 billion, the digital voice assistant will be in use by 2023 and there will be 163 million smart speakers by 2021. We observed its presence in 2020, and in 2021 voice recognition, Smart speakers, eCommerce through voice technology will rule the market. These features are also enhancing the business front when clubbed with web applications.
The giant MNCs like Google, Nike, Amazon, Microsoft, and others are using this technology to expand their business rapidly. Like Alexa and echo smart speaker assist with AI technology is helping you search for products in Amazon, or Google bringing voice for calendar management.
Main Features-
Hassle-free client experience
Quicker access to website information
multitasking facilitates and high client engagement
Increases customer loyalty
Increases conversion ratio and sales
5. Single page websites (SPW/SPA)
Who doesn’t want to get all in one place? No need to switch. No need to wait...!!
Well, it becomes a bit irritating when one click redirects to one more web page downloaded from a server. It also leaves an adverse impact on users by consuming more and more time. This kind of situation leads to the trend of single-page websites. Such websites are gaining popularity due to their sleek, smart, concise, and secure features. They are beneficial to visitors/customers because of their simplicity. At the same time, they offer great ease of maintenance and implementation to organizations who are making it, especially when they are start-ups.
(Source: clockwise.software)
Customers/visitors are now looking for information with the least of navigation or clicks. Here SPA comes for instant communication and the least wait-time. Single page websites assist businesses to attend to certain specific target audiences with limited content that will gain more popularity in the coming year. Apple, Google Drive, Facebook are applying this technique for a while.
Main Features-
Great web experience with high speed and fast loading
Smooth and unique user experience
Enhanced conversion ration
Effective brand marketing
Mobile-friendliness
6. Accelerated mobile pages (AMP)
AMP is an open-source project intended to assist web originators in generating mobile-optimized matter that loads instantaneously on all devices. Developed through plugins, offering faster loading time, and extremely popular for an exceptional UI/UX, accelerated mobile pages are getting more popular as the new year approaches. The best part of AMP is that it offers excellent results without complicated coding and helps organizations increase their online presence.
Companies like CNBC, BMW, carved, fast commerce are leveraging the potential of AMP. AMP consists of three elements:
AMP HTML – Subset of HTML tags optimized for AMP pages
AMP JS – JavaScript library specifically for AMP pages,
AMP CDN – Content Delivery Manager responsible for delivering all documents to the AMP page.
(Source: setupad.com)
Main Features-
Faster page loading
User friendly with a high conversion rate
Easily accessible
Instant page accessibility
Seamless integration with third party elements
7. Dark-themed UI & Low light UX
Websites with dark mode and low light user experience have been a trend for the last couple of years. This trend will continue to dominate in 2021 as well. Dark-modes look great even when the visitors are browsing them in daylight. The new lot of web development is going in for a dark theme since they are better for OLED screens, save electricity, and have a long span of life. They look great and enhance the visibility pattern of other accent colors. Apart from these, users prefer dark-themed UI to reduce their eye strain. As per the recent statistics, low light UX is the most demandable trend of digital user experience.
WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Android, Apple, YouTube, Reddit, and others are applying those features.
Main Features-
Lesser battery consumption
Easy to understand and use for developers
SEO and user friendly
Less strain to eyes and highlights the required text
Availability of online guidance
8. 3D elements & motion UI gaining momentum
3D visual elements have gained momentum in the last few years, and with the beginning of the new year, the trends will have an increased curve. An interactive 3D design attracts users staying back on the site for a longer time. It creates a high experience for your website and garners customer attention as well. Industries like the gaming and movie industry, medicine, architecture, science, engineering, and others are key implementors of 3D technology.
Motion UI is another trend you will watch in 2021 used for developing websites with enhanced animation. Through this trend, developers will no longer have to work on JavaScript and jQuery to animate the website content. They will be able to develop websites that focus on minimalist design with enhanced interactions.
(Source: aufaitux.com)
Main Features-
Offer a realistic look as if physically present
Eye-catching, modern, and robust
Provide a futuristic touch
Can gel well with other 2D images
9. Internet of things (IoT) for web-worlds
IoT is one of the big names today, spreading its usefulness all over. Internet of Things involves connecting the dots between devices and humans with the learning of innovation. IoT is now more demandable in the web development industry to make web architecture and User Interface more creative and interactive. IoT has been instrumental in getting involved smoothly without day-to-day technologies on both the personal and professional front. Initially, this is involved in facilitating web tools to track data from IoT-based smart devices.
Now, IoT has also been actively helping in the web development process by integrating with other technologies like wearables, cloud-based devices, serverless technologies as well as create advanced communication between website layouts and operational models. Web development will be heavily instrumental in analyzing data from a variety of IoT devices. Even serverless computing will execute more efficiently with IoT. Smart voice assistants like Echo, Apple's Siri are some real-world examples of IoT.
Main Features-
Data sensing and collection
Device connection and connectivity
Interaction with multiple user interfaces
Predictive design to predict future behavior
Secure data transmission of private information
10. Security of data getting more importance
With the advent of new technology in the web world, the importance of data security has been increasing gradually. Web security is essential for web development to keep hackers and cyber-thieves from accessing sensitive information. A proactive security strategy helps businesses to minimize risk factors, escalation of malware, attacks on other websites, networks, and other IT infrastructure. Novel website monitoring tools are coming into the market starts from keeping a stringent check on the security of all data involved. With the help of different algorithms, sensitive data is being encrypted, and AI is also leveraged for cybersecurity.
Main Features-
Distributed data processing to keep data safe
AI-based solutions to find out possible threats
Increased usage of productive security testing tools
Security testing included all through the development life cycle
11. Push notification gaining popularity
For a while, push notifications have been a normally important feature in a mobile app, and now, they are getting used in web development. This feature helps in notifying users whenever there is new content present barring the need to checking emails or browsing sites. It is quite similar to populous, but the difference is that it can notify you at any point of time, even if you are not on a website. The features come up with direct communication between the clients. Businesses can stay in touch with clients worldwide and offer an excellent client experience with this tech solution.
Main Features-
Encourages the branding of products
Assists targeted user community
Helps in fastening decisions and enhances sales
Delivers authentic messages to customers
Categorizes customers depending upon time and demography
12. Other important technology
As a part of modern-day web development, WebAssembly helps to compile the code into bytecode that can run in the browser, making the functioning speedy. It helps in fastening the heavy JavaScript-based calculations, that otherwise, can dampen the overall performance of the website/app. This powerful technology is being used most while creating online image editors, web games, music apps, interactive training / educational apps, etc.
Apart from that serverless architecture helps in avoiding overload of data, loss of data, and costly development. Businesses are now applying serverless architecture for handling messaging systems for broadcasting various types of real-world events. Cloud computing is also gaining popularity in web development by preventing data loss and data overloading.
Wrapping in a note
When the world was coping-up with the worldwide pandemic, the web development trends revolve around facilitating the work from home scenarios. After one year of struggle, remote solutions are being sought for, but our motto remains the same – offering users a smart, sleek, scalable, fast, and secure experience.
I hope bespoke trends will make some amazing changes in your web app development strategy and introduce a newer height, showcase newer advancements.
Top comments (2)
Great information, thanks for sharing. As a web designer, I find these trends very relatable and useful in general. One more thing that I would add, would be the use of neomorphism in design. More and more web development companies use it these days. For example, the other day I saw this company based in Singapore, and from their website firstcom.com.sg you can see the usage of this trend. In general, I think that the community should share more these sorts of things, different insights that are helpful in the area of coding, design, and testing. Sharing is caring after all. I would like to hear more from you guys.
New trend: optimizing code correctly instead of relying on petty solutions to "boost" your work's performance.