What’s Hot in WP Design for 2020?
Each new year delivers a fresh layer of sophistication to the WordPress experience. For 2020, that trend shows no signs of abating. While you might hire someone else to handle your company’s high-tech chores like HAProxy log parser, firewall maintenance and cyber security, there’s no reason to avoid some of the more interesting, and simpler, chores associated with new WordPress trends.
Users can’t seem to get enough of the following WP trends, and web designers everywhere report a burst of interest in just about anything that enhances user experience without demanding additional expertise. Some surveys have revealed that even the most tech-savvy business owners and consumers have had their fill of complex add-ons. It’s almost as though the market has reached the point of diminishing returns, where it takes way too much added expertise to deliver just a whit of extra benefit.
Regardless of the sociological and psychological reasons behind the latest WP trends, here’s what consumers are gravitating toward as the new decade gets underway:
Typography That Stands Out
It took a while, but business owners and individual site administrators finally realized that bold type can actually make an impression on consumers. Bold typography is now one of the biggest low-tech trends in WP design. A few major corporations, in fact, have revised their long-standing commercial pages by doing nothing more than changing a certain amount of the header type to boldface.
But there’s more to the trend than that. Even the staidest corporate clients are now asking designers to play around with type styles and fonts. It’s most likely an effort to stay competitive amid the deluge of clever, sophisticated sites on the market. When millions of websites now resemble art galleries and include clever, user-friendly tech that makes customers happy, the mega-corporations couldn’t ignore the social wave.
Design Adapted to the Mobile First Movement
Many market-savvy pundits in the tech world predicted this one. A decade ago, when one or two members of a planning team would carp about making sure the company website needed to be mobile-friendly, they were answered with stares and frowns. Ten years later, those outsiders are saying, “We told you so.”
In fact, the tide has turned completely, with many commercial sites now opting to design their pages specifically for mobile devices first, and larger screens as a secondary concern. Why the sea change? It’s all about e-commerce and the fact that not only are people buying most of their goods online, they’re also browsing and paying with their phones or tablets. “Mobile First” is perhaps the largest single trend in web design in ten years, and that’s saying something in a market whose DNA is all about change.
The New Minimalism
Sophistication, large typefaces, oodles of apps and more have created a mini-trend among some website owners: minimalism. There’s something entirely human about the new breed of commercial websites that have downsized their tech complexity and gone back to simple shopping carts, plain text product descriptions, rare use of video and real-person customer service. Minimalism will never take over the tech world, but it will always have its niche.