Top Web Development Trends for 2020

Top Web Development Trends to Look for in 2020 Introduction A website is an integral part of a business, no matter its niche or industry. It is like an online portfolio of your company, or for yourself if you sell a service.

Websites have replaced many things, but we need adapt to latest trends, to make them even better. The way we have been looking at website development should change, and so does the elements we have yet stayed focused on.

We wrote this article to list the top web development trends, so you could better your website according to 2020 standards. Some trends might require you to revamp your website, you can use this guide to know the cost associated with revamping your website. It all depends on, if you already have a website, it might be harder to implement some trends, and it might be easy for some, same goes with a new website.

Before you dive into these top trends, ensure you are not hurting your website in any way. If your website gets too heavy, and it increases the load time, the number of visitors and their conversion will take a very hard fall. It’s great to incorporate some necessary trends, but just don’t it is a feeling that someone else is doing it, so you should too.

Building a new website? Things are a lot more different in that case. First of all, evaluate if you need to focus on a particular trend, then ask your web developer or website development company if it’s feasible, and then conclude if you want it in or not. Some of the trends below could be used on a WordPress website, but some of them would require custom coding to implement.

Let us begin with the top website development trends to look forward in 2020.

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Single Page Applications

• Accelerated Mobile Pages • Minimalist design • Blockchain • WebAssembly • Customer Service • Browser extensions • AI/ML • Progressive Web Apps • Voice Search

A small thing to be noted is, take our advice (if any) with a pinch of salt. We might recommend some trend to be implemented at all costs, but remember that this article is generalized, and might be way too off for some business websites.

1. Single Page Applications (SPAs) Single Page Applications can be a great asset if it’s used correctly. Everything is possible with SPAs, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. SPAs have been around for a while but have proved to worth with their YoY growth. All thanks to its unique features that we could easily list it as one of the top web development trends in 2020.

Advantages of SPA: •

Saved time from repeated fetching from the server

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1 Template/1 UX is loved by many

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Adaptable Layout

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Performance improvements

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Offline working capabilities

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Load once, use whenever approach

These advantages of SPAs are mostly for small to medium-sized websites, if you have multiple pages, things can get pretty tricky. But SPAs won’t let you down so easily, you can still use them separately for the pages you want, while the others load in the background. We believe the most important advantage of SPAs is how they can we used to satisfy the user until the user can navigate to your exclusive (but heavy) website.

Implementing single page applications get tricky at times, but if you have explicitly opted for web app development services, it’s fairly simple for the experienced ones. It may also not be a good fit for every niche like we said above, choose depending on what your users want, not what the world is doing. The bottom line is, SPAs are here to stay and improve, in 2020 and beyond, so if they fit your needs, go for it.

2. AMP You might have probably heard about it, or at least know about it, already.

Accelerated mobile pages are built to speed up things on mobiles, along with a better representation of the website’s content. We know mobile digital traffic is mostly on mobile apps, but that includes every social media app too. People regularly use mobile for searching for something on Google, or if a business doesn’t have an app, they head to the website.

People really do visit websites on the mobile, the stats favor the mobile apps for the fact that they are a part of people’s daily chores. You need to optimize your website to be displayed properly on mobile because that’s what the future is. People love the portability and a fast loading uncluttered mobile website is the only way you will succeed in this competitive market.

It might also benefit you in SEO, so it’s a way to reach the top of SERPs. People are getting more used to AMPs, if you don’t do that, people might stutter opening that webpage of yours. Apart from that, the way you display information is a very important factor. As we said above, minimalist is going to be the way ahead, AMPs work on a similar pattern, and are much faster than regular webpages.

3. Minimalist design Less clutter is the way to a visitor’s heart, in most cases. The best example of minimalist design is Apple’s products, simplicity is what matters to Apple users.

If you have a business that requires the customers to visit your website regularly, make sure you keep it simple. An interactive website is great, but doing it too much may just push users off, and they would never even look back.

Top complements to a minimalist design: •

Asymmetric design

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Bold fonts and big headings

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Simple background Videos/ Micro Animations

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Hidden navigation

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Voice search (A complete description on it ahead)

You could use all of these, but that wouldn’t remain too minimalist then. Use only what’s necessary, take advice or a free quote from a web design agency if you want a direction. If you are planning to revamp your website, make sure you focus on the UI/UX development services, that’s the first thing a user’s going to notice when they visit your website.

4. Blockchain

Blockchain is ideal whenever you are looking to, improve your business processes, ease transactions, and/or improve privacy control. Your first thought about this point might be ‘why Blockchain development is a part of top web development trends?’, You have your answer in the first sentence itself.

Blockchain can’t particularly be used to make design changes on the front end, but it can certainly change and revolutionize the back end.

The systems we are talking about, how they could be revolutionized by blockchain, will go as far as you want it to. Blockchain could serve as a network, a way to link databases directly, a whole new way we think of the internet, and much more. Your primary requirements with blockchain would decide how deep you want to go, but if you are planning for it, we suggest you should implement it wherever feasible.

5. Web Assembly Been in the talk for a few years now, it is something that promises to change the way we see our webpages. The top change to be introduced in a really long while, WebAssembly is set to take webpages on to the next level. Wasm has been very recently recognized as an official web standard of the world wide web by W3C. The top browsers too, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari, completely support Wasm.

Wasm is certainly going to be one of the biggest web development trends in 2020, being recognized as the fourth pillar or world wide web now. Wasm would enable so much more than what has been offered with JavaScript. The byte code that allows blazing fast speed and low space consumption will slowly but completely revamp the internet.

The things may not be going too well lately, people are arguing about Wasm’s performance being only slightly faster than JavaScript. We believe JavaScript is already a good performer, the road from here might be slow, but Wasm would add up the performance to make it better for the entire internet. Sooner or later, you will have to adapt to it, so we believe, the best time to do that, is right now in 2020.

6. Customer service People always have questions, some major, some minor, your job is to never let them down. Everyone who visits your website might be curious about something or the other, that’s probably why they visited in the first place.

Providing support is essential, no matter what your niche is, having support can significantly help lower the bounce rate. It will also help to make a connection with visitors, which will help you convert them.

Top tips for better customer service •

24/7 Support

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Personalize support in all possible ways

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Don’t push users for anything

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Only use chatbots until necessary

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Always try to keep 1(or more) human support online

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Work according to your business’s ideology

Through quality Chatbot development services by some of the top AI development companies, for most scenarios, Chatbots are now able to provide exquisite support. But what many people believe about Chatbots, which is actually wrong, is that they think Chatbots can work with 0 human support. We suggest you focus on actual support, it will matter much more for converting potential customers. We completely support the idea of Chatbots, but stop promoting them, rather promote the human support you offer.

7. Browser extensions If you provide a service that has the potential of being a part of someone’s daily browsing, think about making it a browser extension. If not, search for a list of the browser extensions that work for your niche and do your part by optimizing them for use on your website. The utility of browser extensions is top-notch, making them one of the top web development trends in 2020.

Don’t limit the possibilities by any means, you need to think beyond, and about how extensions can be used for your advantage. People usually use extensions to solve a purpose, giving them a purpose might be a good idea? Or aiding extensions for better solutions? The internet is a playground, give your best to stay at the top of the game.

8. AI/ML Machine learning and Artificial intelligence go hand in hand, but could the same be said for AI/ML and web development solutions? We guess it might.

The pace at which these technologies are growing, it’s only time till websites have to comply with them. A lot of data is collected by your website, patterns, user data, and much more than that. Data is the primary requirement for AI/ML, so you already got 1 box ticked.

The most relevant example to talk about in here for the duo of AI development and web development definitely has to be Chatbots. Some smart and some not so smart Chatbots, all work on the AI tech and found most of their uses in mobile apps and websites. But don’t think it’s limited to Chatbots, there could be many other uses like dynamic websites that know what a user might like.

Combine the three for advanced user experience, fetch the data, use machine learning algorithms, take both and feed it to the AI, and then use it for multiple purposes. With AI/ML slowly gaining pace, the least we could expect in 2020 are new-age Chatbots, but much more could be drawn for their power for a 360-website improvement. It is up to you to decide, for where you could implement these technologies, but do give a thought to them at least.

9. PWA Progressive web apps, a widely adapted idea is going to take over more than what it already has. There are enough benefits to progressive web apps to make them the MVP of this list. A small sized app, with 0 compromises on the app experience, for your desktop? It doesn’t get better than this. There are so many advantages associated with it, we will have to make a list of them.

Top advantages of PWAs: •

Lower costs

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Less data usage

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A Full-fledged app-like experience

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Great retention and conversion rates

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No store required for downloading/ no profits shared

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It can be updated much easier than Native apps.

PWA is an absolute necessity if it fits your niche of website, the top popular examples are Spotify, and 2048. While Spotify made a complete PWA in and out of the browser (add it by clicking the + sign), 2048 works only in the browser and has limited functionalities of a PWA. They are far greater than our generic websites, and 2-steps ahead of the native apps, if your business requirements fit, we strongly recommend you get a PWA.

10. Voice Search Voice search is typically taking the searches to the next level, what matters in web development is adapting to it. Voice searches use natural language processing, and when someone uses it, it so much, unlike typing. The perspective of the user doing a voice search typically revolves around the fact that they are speaking in their natural language. The keywords you targeted for a typed search would not match the queries through voice search.

More natural and longer keywords need to be targeted when accounting voice search, think about the way you ask Siri or google assistant for that instance.

SEO is one of the greatest factors while developing a web app, but people usually ignore it and finally regret it in the end. If you want to top the SERPs, you will need to focus on the SEO, if most of your traffic is the people who use voice search, ask your marketing team to focus keywords with voice searches in mind.

Conclusion Some of these factors might contradict, some might complement. Some might work for every single niche, some might work for none. Before jumping onto implementing these web development trends, we recommend you research on your potential website visitors. The list isn’t weighted starting from top to bottom, to maintain equal balance for everyone reading this article. Technology is changing at a really fast pace, the only way to keep up is by upgrading your product.

WordPress is great for small businesses, and many of these trends fit perfectly onto a WordPress website, but when your business grows, you need to think about and weigh in a lot of things. You can use some tips for a small website too, but most of them work for medium to big websites. Calculate the cost to benefit ratio, and if it’s feasible for your business, don’t shy in implementing these web development trends.

Reference: https://semidotinfotech.com/blog/top-web-development-trends/