The Breakdown of the 2020 Website Development Trend

With the firstmonth of 2020 now up and running, it is a great time to forecast this year’s trend in website design and development. With announcement from Google and a general overview of digital design trend online, the following 2020 website development trend is brought to you by WeBOOST website development.

• Responsive Website Design

If you have been working in website development industry, you might think what I am going to say is utter garbage. However, the benefits of responsive website are coming to play in recent months.

Responsive websites basically meant that both desktop and mobile users are using the same domain to visit your website, without the m. before or a /m after a domain.

Many recently redesigned websites have adopted responsive website design in enhancing user experience but also helping them to rank better in Google.

As Google constantly emphasize on mobile friendly websites, it is frequent to see mobile version of websites being indexed rather than the desktop version. For the continuous shift to mobile devices, it might seem to be great, except that desktop still owns 48.7% of internet usage in October 2016.

Utilizing one page for both mobile and desktop users is the definite trend in 2020 and one that old websites should revamp to follow as well.

• Better scrolling experience

At the 2019 Chrome DevSummit, Google has announced the new CSS features and Houdini for more powerful web styling. And one of those that made me most excited is the snapping features.

Both the horizontal snap and vertical snap are exceptionally cool features for e-Commerce websites to showcase their products in a contemporary and responsive way. And now you can also use matrix snap for a two-dimensionalsea of products that snaps automatically when the input paused.

These moving css styles are more than just a gimmick, but a building of relationship between the website and the potential customers. Physical actions have been known to be linked to memory. And the use of movement responsive features aids the process to build an impression that could result in conversion.

• Dark mode

Dark mode used to be a nerdy feature for those who spend hours staring at the monitor. The adoption of a dark background helps to reduce eyes fatigue in low-light conditions while being very unique when compared to traditional white backgrounds.

As almost every operating system is introducing dark user interfaces, it is now also possible to create a dark-based website that responds to the colour preference of that particular operating system.

While it is an aesthetic change for some of us, others will be glad that reduced motion, high contrast and reduced transparency features are also available to suit individual operating systems for a more accessible web.

• Website loading speed

The speed to load a website has been hugely influential for internet users the past decade and will obviously continue to this decade.46% of frequent browsers said waiting for pages to load is the most dissatisfactory aspect of website browsing.

And we have seen efforts in making large websites to load faster withlazyloading and the webp image format.

With search engine performance being increasingly essential for the reach of a website, website loading speed will have an even greater importance in the 2020s. So, Google has responded with new performance metrics.

One of the factors are the largest contentful paint performance. Rather than assessing the loading time of the first meaningful content, the speed test of Google now places a greater focus on the part that offers most meaningful content to check the time when users actually get useful information.

With some websites using images or videos as a major part of their landing page, the speed to load the images and videos become more crucial to the performance of the website.