Main Web Development Trends You Should Be Ready For in 2021
In this article
Explore web development trends: PWAs, AMP, responsive design, voice search, APIs, push notifications, and AI chatbots. Elevate user experience and drive business growth.
Trends in websites creation are an ever-changing thing that makes website development easier and allows the implementation of new technologies that boost the performance of any business. To follow the right trends, it is vital to be aware of all of them. In order for you to be aware of the latest trends, we decided to make a selection of the most popular and which you should take a closer look at in 2021. So, without further ado, let’s get started.
Trend #1. Progressive Web Applications
This trend is one of the most impactful and popular so far since PWA is a leverage web browsing experience making it closer to the native app experience. To keep it simple, Progressive Web Applications is a website that provides features that are more common to native mobile apps. For example, PWA can have:
- Push notifications
- Offline access
- Hardware access and much more.
But there’s a logical question that appears – why Progressive Web Apps are so popular? And the answer is simple – the popularity of mobile devices. According to researches, mobile devices are dominant over desktop or tablet devices. As a result, users surfing more from smartphones, and PWA fix all issues of websites, making them more flexible and feature-rich on mobile devices. Besides that, many famous companies follow this trend and create their own PWAs that boost their businesses. For example:
- Alibaba
- Forbes
- Virgin America and many more.
Another reason why Progressive Web Apps are so popular is their cost-effectiveness since these apps require 4x less development time than regular native iOS or Android app. Everything is simple. Less development time = less web application development cost.
Trend #2. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
The faster your website loading speed, the higher will Google ranks it. So to boost your website performance, you should follow the AMP trend that was first introduced back in 2015. But what it’s all about?
In simple terms, this technology allows you to create websites that load with lightning speed, namely in less than 2 seconds (which is 11 times faster than standard websites). As a result, your SEO indicators will increase many times over if you build your website on AMP technology.
Development of AMP pages cannot do without a special tool called AMP HTML, and Google has released detailed documentation that will help you get acquainted with it and the principle of implementation in development.
Trend #3. Responsive Website Design
Despite the fact that responsive design is a fairly old method of developing a website, it still hasn’t lost its relevance in 2021. The only difference is that it used to be a nice addition to the site, but now it is a strict prerequisite for website development. In addition, Google already takes into account the “mobility” of sites when indexing them. The better the site looks and performs on mobile devices, the higher the search ranking.
Trend #4. Voice Search Features and Their Optimization
Voice features are another trend you should be aware of since it’s already leveraging the world of web searches and development. According to a recent study, over 30% of web searches will be done through voice search by the end of 2021.
In addition, analysts estimate that over 21 million voice searches will come from the United States. As a result, in order to get on this wave, you should turn on the optimization of your site for voice queries and make it one of the points of your SEO because it is not a good idea to pass such an audience stream.
To develop and implement voice requests, you should use the Web Speech API. This tool is ideal for processing voice data. Using this tool you can embed speech recognition in your search bar on the website, as well as transform the text into machine speech.
Trend #5. API-First Website Development
The connectivity of web applications with other applications is one of the main requirements in the development of such a product today. In order to ensure compatibility with as many devices as possible, you should use the API-first development process.
The standard development process is already obsolete and only slows down the creation of a web application and makes development more expensive and difficult. However, many companies pay little attention to API development.
The standard API development cycle looks like this:
- Step 1. The R&D team develops the design part.
- Step 2. Back-end developers prototype the application while all other departments wait.
- Step 3. After the development of the prototype is ready, the QA and the front-end begin their part of the work on it.
- Step 4. If errors were found during the test or the customer decided to implement a new feature, the whole cycle repeats again.
API-first development is not about such an outdated process. Development takes place simultaneously and completely removes cases when one team is waiting for the other to complete their part of the work on the project. As a result, development is faster and, as a result, it will cost less.
Trend #6. Push Notifications
Push notifications are an indispensable tool in improving the user experience and if you want your site to be always in touch with users. Previously, this feature was the prerogative of native applications, but now web applications have the opportunity to improve themselves by implementing notifications.
You can use notifications in order to provide the user with various information. For example, notify about a recently published publication, about a favorite product that is now at a discount, and so on. In addition, notifications can be sent without the need to collect information and register a user. You will have another channel of connection with the audience that you can use to promote your brand.
Developers often use these tools to create notifications in web applications: OneSignal, PushEngage, and ZoPush.
Trend #7. Chatbots Based on Artificial Intelligence
The bigger your business, the more difficult it becomes to organize a high-quality customer support system. And this problem is especially acute if you work in different time zones. Operators can only work at certain times, and they can make mistakes, and so on. AI chatbots come to the rescue in such situations.
This trend is to gradually replace the standard way of customer support with an automated one. Algorithms can already conduct a full-fledged conversation, answer questions, redirect to various sections, and much more. Nobody says that chatbots will completely replace ordinary consultants, but chatbots are a kind of “the first line of defense” where users ask the most frequent questions and do not require the presence of a consultant. If the issue cannot be resolved, the chatbot may offer to connect with a consultant for a more detailed analysis of the problem.
Trend #8. Motion UI
Website design is its key highlight that showcases your brand and attracts customers. Motion UI is a multifunctional library that contains various useful tools that help you create unique designs. Using this library, you can implement various animations (simple and complex), modify site modules, and much more. In addition, this library is fully compatible with any JavaScript framework, which makes it almost an indispensable tool in many cases of creating a website.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, there are a lot of trends, and they are all different. Each of them is intended to improve one or another aspect of website and web application development. This allows you to combine them and create modern websites that boost your business and attract customers. Now you are armed with the latest knowledge in web development and are ready to apply it to your project.
Author’s bio
Vitaly Kuprenko is a writer for Cleveroad. It’s a web and mobile app development company with headquarters in Ukraine. He enjoys writing about technology and digital marketing.
