web development

8 Web Development Trends Every CTO Should Be Ready for in 2021

Web development trends change to a greater or lesser extent every single year. For decision-makers, it’s vital to be familiar with them for at least two reasons: to sustain ever-rising competition and to sharpen the knowledge.

To save your time and provide a concentrated piece of information about web development trends in 2021, we’ve analyzed market demands in different fields of the IT industry and made up this list based on them.

If you just want to quickly look through the main points, here’s the list of web development trends for 2021 that we’ve considered:

  1. Progressive Web Apps
  2. Accelerated Mobile Pages
  3. Responsive websites
  4. Voice search optimization
  5. API-first development
  6. Push notifications
  7. AI-powered chatbots
  8. Motion UI

#1. Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

PWA is probably one of the most impactful trends in web development. It pushes the world wide web forward making website browsing experience closer to native mobile applications and, therefore, more friendly to users.

In a nutshell, PWA is a website which, however, offers functionality traditionally available to native apps (e.g. push notifications, offline access, hardware access).

A recent research shows that mobiles dominate over other devices such as desktops or tablets. Furthermore, there is a serious gap between using mobile apps and mobile browsers. To be precise, applications account for more than 80% of the overall time users spend with their gadgets.

That’s a huge difference and PWAs are able to change the situation for better by troubleshooting issues users hate about websites the most: poor experience, slowness, no offline access.

#2. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Google takes serious steps to enhance the mobile browsing experience. The company first introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to publicity back in 2015 and nowadays it’s one of the latest trends of web technologies.

What is it? This technology is created to encourage building websites that load instantly and work very smoothly across mobile devices. AMP pages are loaded for about 2 seconds vs. up to 22 seconds for non-AMP pages.

Sinсe Google loves speedy websites, AMP pages can increase the website’s visibility and contribute to higher positions in SERP. Which means this technology is also great for SEO.

#3. Responsive Websites

While web development trends for 2021 are being populated with rather new technologies like PWA and AMP, such relatively old ones as responsive web design are still out there on the scene.

The difference is that years ago it has been a good-to-have feature and now it’s obviously must-to-have. As said, the overwhelming majority of users prefer mobile devices over any others. Regarding that, Google is planning to add mobile-first indexing. That means the website’s ranking will depend on how well it’s optimized for mobiles.

#4. Voice Search Optimization

Voice search is another trend you can’t afford to overlook. It already has a great impact on the web and more is yet to come. According to Gartner, about 30% of all searches will be done without using a screen by 2021. Not to mention the number of smart speakers which is rising year over year. The Activate outlook suggests there will be about 21.4 million of them in the United States by 2021.

Consequently, voice commerce sales are also expected to grow dramatically and reach $5 billion in the UK and $40 billion in the US by 2022.

Taking into consideration multiple studies and actual market situation, voice search optimization is the web development trend you cannot ignore. It should become a part of your SEO and tech strategy as soon as possible. Early adopters are always ahead of the competition.

#5. API-First Development

Current trends in website development suggest that web solutions have to be well-prepared for connectivity with other applications. It’s no surprise considering the rise of mobiles, wearables, and other devices that should integrate with one another. That’s where the tendency for API-first development approach comes from.

What’s wrong with traditional approach? When a company’s main focus is to build a web or mobile solution they usually don’t pay much attention to API development. At best, it comes as a side project that might not be properly designed and tested.

Another problem of the traditional approach is a time-consuming API design process which increases development expenses and service market entry time.

The traditional API development cycle looks as follows:

  1. R&D team creates a design.
  2. Back-end developers work on a prototype (while the rest of the team like QA engineers and front-end developers are waiting).
  3. As soon as the prototype is ready QA and front-end developers get access to it.
  4. In case of a bug, new feature, or any improvement this cycle will be repeated all over again.

API-first development is simultaneous and doesn’t force one part of the team wait until the other will finish its work. Correspondingly, it goes faster since API is made and all teams can work with it.

#6. Push Notifications

Push notifications are a powerful tool for enhancing the overall user experience and marketing efforts of the company. Even though mobile applications traditionally have strong and flexible capabilities for user notifications, web apps gain momentum here as well.

On the web apps, push notifications are used to deliver different information to end users (e.g. new blog post, clothing you liked back in stock, etc.) All this is possible without a necessity to register and leave credentials like email. This gives additional channels for companies to interact with their target audience and provides for additional marketing opportunities.

#7. AI-Powered Chatbots

A large number of businesses work across different time zones and have representation on various continents. This makes the arrangement of a good customer service a very complex and costly task, especially considering 24/7 support which is needed in this case.

Web development trends of recent years definitely shift towards automated, instant client support. Chatbots powered with AI and machine learning proved themselves to be a worthy long-term investment for this purpose. They can answer FAQs, connect with the right human client assistant, take an order, etc.

#8. Motion UI

Every product strives to be as engaging and attractive as possible. Motion UI library is a perfect solution to capture users’ attention with beautiful animations. The library is capable of animating design elements with grace and lets developers play with them as they want. It’s flexible enough and works with any JavaScrip framework which makes it a great option for many use cases.

The Bottom Line

If you’ve planned the update of your web product in 2021, it’s definitely a good thought to look through the modern trends in web development and think of which one can be useful for you before contacting a web development company.

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