30th August 2022 by 
Web development trends have evolved and shifted rapidly since the internet’s birth in 1983. Today, there are approximately 1.58 billion websites and around 5 million daily active users of the internet. Here at Heckford, we are continually aware of the changing web development trends.
Keeping website performance and user experience up to date is important as your competitors may gain the upper hand in offering a better user experience. Therefore, you may lose traffic to those more up to date websites.
Below are some of the web development trends we expect to see evolve over the coming months.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
This is not a particularly new web development trend. But, PWAs in their latest iteration are going to eventually replace web apps permanently. PWAs assists websites in loading in next to no time at all and can also work offline. Companies such as Twitter and Pinterest have been using PWAs to provide a better user experience. Additionally, other benefits of PWAs include reduced development and maintenance costs.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)
Google back in 2015 launched Google AMP. The intention behind AMP is to provide mobile users with quick digital experiences. Moreover, by providing flawless user experiences coupled with a decreasing bounce rate, AMP can improve metrics such as on page conversions. Also, AMP can provide the possibility of a higher search engine result position.
However since 2020, AMP usage has in fact trended down but it remains one of the most widely used mobile technologies. Search engine algorithms have also changed as other factors now determine the positioning of a web page. Plus, newer web technologies can also effectively speed up the website just as well.
AI chatbots
AI chatbots are becoming more sophisticated in meeting the needs of a global audience and their behaviours. By utilising machine learning, natural language processing and information retrieval techniques, chatbots are evolving towards real-time automated assistants.
AI chatbots can help with improving customer experience. Chatbots can gather data, answer common questions and solve other issues. Therefore, they provide customers with a faultless digital experience with a business. The chatbot market is to reach $110 billion by 2023 according to Juniper Research.
WordPress Development
40% of all websites are powered by the WordPress content management system (CMS). WordPress is open source and adds more features to meet the user’s need continually. At Heckford, we use WordPress for many of our web builds and we highlighted our reasons for doing so in our ‘why we use WordPress at Heckford’ article.
The arrival of Full Site Editing (FSE) this year extends the block editing functionality to the entire website. This means a pivotal change in how WordPress websites are managed and created is set to disrupt the CMS marketplace.
2022 will be a pivotal year for the CMS as it introduces the biggest change to theming in the history of the open-source project: Full Site Editing.
Carl Hancock, Gravity Forms CEO
Dark Mode Standardisation
Dark and low-light websites and apps have gained popularity. 8 in 10 people prefer to use dark mode wherever possible. The implementation of this feature has already been rolled out in Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and iOS Outlook.
Dark mode has it’s own benefits such as being less energy consuming, less ‘blue light’ and less eye strain. As more developers add this feature into both websites and emails, Dark Mode is set to become standard and may become the default for applications too.
Improved Cybersecurity
The practice of securing networks, data and computers is one of the most critical concerns this year. Every business, regardless of size, is vulnerable. In June 2021, hackers scraped the accounts of 700 million Linkedin users which included personal information such as email addresses and phone numbers.
The CDN provider Cloudflare reported the number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks doubled in each quarter of 2020. Downtime caused by a DDoS attack will lead to loss of revenue and reputation.
According to Cloudflare in the second quarter of 2022, some of the largest DDoS attacks have been launched including a 26 million request per second attack. Unsurprisingly in light of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a number of broadcast media companies based in Ukraine were the most targeted. In Russia, it was banking, financial and insurance companies that were most targeted with cryptocurrency operations the second most targeted.
As cybercrime increases, web development is adapting to make it easier to protect sensitive customer data. Multi-factor authentication such as Google Authenticator, patch management and Security Operation Centres (SOCs) are now becoming more commonplace.
Serverless Architecture
Aiming to reduce system overloading, data loss and developments costs is an important venture for any business. The result of this search is Serverless Architecture.
Serverless Architecture operates on Cloud technology, allowing the execution of code for any type of application or service with zero administration. Developers can create and support software without the worry of the underlying server infrastructure. The provisioning, managing and upgrades of servers is also unnecessary. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the forerunners in providing and using Serverless Architecture.
More products such as chatbots and APIs will use serverless functions to perform specific tasks. As such, this market is expected to grow to $21.1 billion by 2025. Therefore, more companies will enter this market this year and beyond.
Looking to keep your website up to date and competitive, we have the expertise and we would love to help you.
Older 