Which web design trends can you adopt to grow your business?
Today, businesses derive so much value from websites. Starting with access to a wide array of customers to automated data collection for consumer analysis, websites have become indispensable.
Yet the technological advancement in web development continues to break barriers of what we can achieve.
In the last year, a number of top web development trends have seen tremendous growth in applications as businesses strive to outdo competitions and woo customers.
According to WebFX, 94% of first impressions of a business are related to web design, and 75% of judgments on a business’s credibility are based on the same.
So if your business is still using old web development techniques, you might be mistaken for a non-progressive company.
On top of that, you miss many opportunities realized through web design innovations.
In this article we’ll go through 5 interesting web development trends you should adopt in 2021
1. Progressive Web Apps
What is the cost of building and maintaining a mobile app?
We can both agree it’s not cheap. To build a fully functional app for your customers is costly, a reserve for big companies and well-financed app startups.
Yet again, the challenges of mobile apps such as, needing to develop for multiple platforms and not being discoverable in search results can be discouraging.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA), one of the top web development trends in 2021 can strike a balance for you. It will allow you to offer your customers the native app experience on any phone and at a fraction of the cost.
A PWA is an application software built using standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript and delivered through the web by browsers.
It uses service workers, manifests, and progressive enhancement features to deliver a user experience close to native apps.
With mobile commerce accounting for 72.9% of total ecommerce sales as of 2021, it is essential to revamp web applications into PWA for 2 main reasons;
First, PWA is lighter and faster than native apps. With increased speeds and less storage consumption, users can enjoy your services much more conveniently. In addition, they can function in offline mode and store cache for instant loading once you get back online.
Secondly, they are significantly cheaper to build and maintain yet they register over 50% higher customer engagements, 35% higher conversion rate than native apps.
These benefits alone can take your business to a whole new level.
Flipkart recorded a 3X increase in time spent by users on the site and a 70% increase in conversions after redesigning their site as a PWA.
PWA is one of the top web development trends implemented in ecommerce, news, and travel sites that want to reach customers without spending much on app development.
2. Accelerated Mobile Pages
One of the biggest challenges with websites is loading speeds which significantly affect user experience.
The many web files that need to be loaded when a user accesses a site for the first time slows down a website especially if it’s not well designed.
Users have no patience for that. More than 50% of users will leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
If you’re trying to make an impact with your business website, you’ve got to get its loading speed right.
Accelerated Mobile Pages have been around since Google’s introduction in late 2015. Today, more businesses are implementing AMPs to gain a competitive advantage.
Essentially, AMP is an open-source framework that leverages stripped-down HTML files to create fast and mobile-friendly copies of web pages.
AMP has a simple design that loads basic features only to provide the most convenient user experience and reduce the risk of a user leaving the site.
Like PWA, AMP saves on the costs of offering users a great web experience while allowing you to reach users with any internet speeds. AMP is a great technology to adopt if your customers mostly originate from regions with slow internet connections.
The optimized AMP version of your site will lower bounce rates, increase user time and conversion rates considering that most people use smartphones to access the internet.
Complex Networks, a global lifestyle brand implemented AMP across 90% of their mobile pages to improve mobile user experience. As a result, they saw a 90% increase in overall sessions and a 3X increase in daily revenue.
AMP is definitely one of the top web development trends you should consider.
3. Artificial Intelligence Chatbots
Online businesses have an advantage over brick-and-mortar entities; they have access to customers all over the globe.
Yet, having a website does not absolve the need to interact with customers regularly.
With access to a larger pool of customers, the workload of customer support increases. You might have to hire agents to take care of customers.
Or have you already?
Well, one of the top web development trends in 2021 is artificial intelligence Chatbots.
Chatbots have been around for some time now. However, with the implementation of AI, their use has grown tremendously. According to Outgrow, 80% of businesses are expected to integrate some form of Chatbot support system by 2022.
And considering the efficiencies AI brings to Chatbots, you can rest assured businesses who adopt these top development trends will have an upper hand against their competition.
Modern Chatbots leverage machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval techniques to provide customers with personalized support and augment human support.
By interacting with multiple customers over time and solving similar customer challenges in various ways, bots can learn to adapt to customers’ demands and provide customized support.
Hence, you can offer great support services to your customers 24/7 at a fraction of the cost and time.
A passenger railroad service deployed an AI Chatbot to help its more than 30,000,000 annual customers with booking. Consequently, the company realized a 30% increase in revenue and more than 800% ROI.
If your business involves a lot of customer support functions, adopting AI Chatbots can significantly boost your operations and scale your business.
4. Voice Search Optimization
Traditionally, we had to type queries on devices to conduct an internet search. No alternative existed.
This meant we could only browse the internet while focused on the activity.
But humans love to multitask.
They enjoy doing all things at the same time as it is perceived as ultimate productivity. Although flawed as a concept, it’s a desire that had to be met.
Google first introduced voice search in 2011 to solve this challenge.
Ever since voice search has experienced exponential growth as customers find it very useful in their daily activities making it one of the top web development trends.
Intelligent virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri have had great demand and the industry is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 28.5% from 2021 to 2028.
It’s only logical for web developers to optimize websites for voice search to enable businesses to enjoy the benefits of technology as customers seek better web experiences.
As a business manager, voice search optimization is one of the interesting web development trends you should adopt.
By implementing simple strategies such as
- focusing on conversational keywords,
- creating persona-based content and
- using Schema Markup to provide context,
you can optimize your website and significantly improve the chances of appearing in voice search results.
Most of these techniques are easy to implement and in case you need assistance, consider investing in a web development service that will provide exceptional voice search optimization functionality.
The latest top web development trends involve voice-activated independent devices and voice optimization coding practices for regular websites and native apps.
According to Adobe, 48% of all general searches are voice searches. Meanwhile, Google found out that most consumers use voice search to find local businesses.
Is there a better time to implement voice search optimization than now?
5. Single Page Application.
Most websites are a collection of different web pages with unique design codes.
Hence, when customers visit a page and decide to navigate to another page on the same website, they often have to wait for pages to load.
According to Google, it takes on average 22 seconds for the average landing page to load.
Unless you’ve implemented clean web development coding standards and use a cache feature, your website might be frustrating to customers with slow internet connections.
A single-page application SPA is one of the top web development trends that offers seamless communication between a browser and website server to provide better loading speeds while ensuring high data security.
Essentially, an SPA loads a single web document and then dynamically updates the body content without reloading the entire page.
Hence a customer enjoys a fluid non-fragmented experience.
SPAs are used by popular websites such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter for various reasons.
First, they are faster than traditional websites. Social media platforms want users to spend more time on their sites. Hence a faster site is a great incentive for them.
Secondly, SPAs are simple to build and manage. If your business is on a tight budget but you still want to offer a great user experience, this is the way to go.
Lastly, they can be made to work offline similarly to Progressive Web Applications.
Netflix, a popular video streaming platform refined its website to a Single Page Application. As a result, it reduced loading time by 50%, and significantly lowered the size of Javascript bundle sizes.
If your business site involves regular customer interactions with your services, you can benefit tremendously from SPA web development practices
Conclusion.
Running an online business or using websites to augment your physical business requires that you employ the best strategies to achieve your digital marketing goals.
With this list of interesting web development trends you should adopt, you can set your business apart by offering a great user experience to your online customers.
Since most of these top web development trends require technical knowledge in various disciplines, engaging a web design expert can save you a lot of time and resources.
Schedule a consultation for free so we could discuss the way forward.
Our team of experienced web developers is ready to help you achieve better results with your website.
