What’s considered a great website is always changing. If you were to go back and look at the best websites of 20 years ago, they would likely look horrible by today’s standards. By the same token, websites that we now view as great will look out of date before long. The best web designers are the ones who can keep up with the latest trends and adapt their style based on the times.
There are many things that can start a new web design trend. Maybe some new research comes out the shows the best performing websites are the ones that display their content on the left side of the page. Or maybe a new technology is developed that lets us do things with websites we couldn’t before.
One current driver of web design trends in WordPress. WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems in the world, due to how easy it is to build a great website with it. By keeping abreast of what the latest WordPress trends are, we can often see how the rest of the web design world is about to change.
Here are just a few WordPress trends that you should keep your eye on going forward:
The Use of Dark Mode
Dark mode first rose to prominence through computer programming. The purpose of the dark mode is typically to reduce eye strain, by altering the color scheme of what you’re viewing. Many applications have a dark mode feature now, including WordPress. With the Dark Mode plugin, you can change the appearance of the CMS, making it easier to use at night.
As more people grow used to having a dark mode option, it will soon become the standard. You’ll likely see other designers incorporating a dark mode function into their own CMS to keep up with WordPress. Also, you may eventually see websites adapting their appearance based on the time of day for the user.
For example, let’s say you have a website that currently displays black text on a white background. With a dark mode feature on your website, this could switch to white text on a black background depending on the time of day. Of course, there is more you would have to switch besides just the text and background color. For instance, you may need to go to your free logo maker and make multiple logos for each mode.
It won’t be long before the dark mode capability offered in the WordPress CMS is expected everywhere, even on your website. Web designers should start planning now as to how they can design a website that works for any time of day.
Multipurpose Themes
One of the best features of WordPress is the use of themes. Themes are essentially web design templates that are easily modified to give the user the website look they are after. With themes, you don’t need to know a lot about web design or coding to get a great looking website.
A new trend in WordPress is that of multipurpose themes. Before them, themes were designed with a single focus in mind. For example, a theme would be developed for a blogging website or an eCommerce site. Multipurpose themes, on the other hand, can be used for any type of website. They offer increased flexibility so that you can develop any type of website you want with a single theme.
This is a great luxury for businesses that want to develop different kinds of websites. Rather than purchasing a new theme for each of their different projects, a business can select one multipurpose theme and keep the same style across their websites. As they continue to grow in popularity, you can expect more web designers to focus on building templates that can be used for multiple things.
You can also checkout our curated collection of Multipurpose WordPress themes:
And here are the few best multipurpose theme we recommend:
- Astra – #1 Multipurpose WordPress Theme
- Punte – Free Multipurpose WordPress Theme [Review]
- Hestia – Free Multipurpose WordPress Theme (Top #5 on WordPress.org)
Bigger Focus on Content
At its core, WordPress is a content management system. This means it is perfect for sites with a lot of content, particularly blogs. Recently, Google has rolled out a new feature, where it highlights text it thinks the user is looking for and brings them right to it on the page. This means that for people finding your website through Google, the design of the page is not nearly as important as the content.
WordPress is one of the best tools when it comes to publishing content and optimizing it for search engines. There are numerous tools available that can improve your content and make sure it’s ready for search engines to index it.
For example, you could use a WordPress Table of Contents plugin to easily outline particularly long text, something that’s hard to do without a good CMS. Google likes to see these sorts of lists and could publish it as the top result in its search ranking. When someone visits your site knowing it likely has the information they seek, you don’t necessarily need the design to keep them around.
Web designers will soon have to follow WordPress’s lead and focus more on how they display their content, rather than the overall look of the site.
Growing Popularity of Live Chat Features
Finally, there is the growing popularity of live chat and chatbots. Normally, integrating these features into your website takes a bit of work. If the web designer didn’t plan for the live chat feature from the beginning, it can be hard to add in without completely redesigning the page. However, this isn’t a problem with WordPress.
There are numerous plugins available that make it easy to add a live chat or chatbot feature to your site in a matter of minutes. As more and more customers look for a live chat feature to conduct customer service, web designers will need to start saving room for this option to get added later.
Keep an Eye on WordPress Trends
Many of the current web design trends got their start on WordPress first. With WordPress, it’s easy to change your site and try new things, which is why so many trends start here first. If you’re a web designer who wants a better idea of where things are heading, keep an eye on what WordPress sites are doing as best you can.
