Top WordPress Web Design Trends to Follow in 2020
The beginning of the year is the ideal time for setting goals, making resolutions and planning new projects. For professionals, it’s a great moment to learn more about trends that will be the next big thing in their industry. This, as a result, can help them build business strategies with the potential to grow revenue and attract new customers. Whether you’re product owner, designer, or web developer focused on WordPress, upcoming trends for 2020 definitely should be of your interest. In this article, we asked the leading WordPress experts to share their thoughts about WordPress web design trends for 2020. So, take a few minutes and dive into the magical world of animations, typography/fonts, shapes, and layers that will shape the WordPress in a new year. Of course, in a case you need more inspiration for your new site, you can always check platforms for website design inspiration.
Ben Pines – Evangelist & Head of Content at Elementor
Animations and motion effects have brought a whole new world of possibilities to the toolkit of the web designer. These designers can add and combine different kinds of movements and connect them to the visitor’s scroll on the website. The result is an immersive experience that is considerably richer than the static website.
Using website builders with motion effects capabilities, the web designer can become a storyteller and relay a complete storyline that develops as the user scrolls. The site visitors, on the other side of the scope, enjoy a much more satisfying user experience, and are more likely to engage with the content and remember it. We are seeing more and more creative web designers taking advantage of the code-free motion effects toolset built into Elementor, and creating one-of-a-kind interactive sites that previously weren’t possible.
Suhaib Zaheer – General Manager at Bluehost
Autoplay videos are very much out, but that doesn’t mean your website has to be completely static. You can add some movement to your web design with some simple animations. A growing number of websites are working animations into the background or images of web pages. A good animation will draw the eye and capture visitor’s interest, without distracting from the main information you want them to see on the page. It’s a web design trend that makes your website a little more engaging and adds some personality.
Maksym Babych – CEO at SpdLoad
Outline shapes have been around for a while, usually, as a secondary call to action or background elements. Recently, top design agencies started a new trend that will get stronger in 2020. A mix of typography and outline shapes. Designers are constantly looking for new ways to incorporate typography within hero images. While bold titles may hide an important part of your image, an outline helps to blend typography and graphics altogether.
Some of the examples also feature a blend between standard and outline typography. Just like primary and secondary buttons with one being an outline. For those to follow this trend, there is one thing to take into account. The font size of typography must be large enough to ensure visibility.
Amanda Bourgeois – the owner of My Web Dev Girl
We are going to see more vertical fonts in web design trends for 2020. Turning social links or company names onto its side draws the eye to important elements on the page. You will often see vertical fonts on the side of the page in little font or straight down the middle in a big and bold font. A sideways font is a statement that you’re not afraid to do something different in an elegant way. Turning links and fonts onto their side is still legible also making this a wonderful and unique design choice that is still user-friendly. Vertical fonts have been used before by some of the most talented web designers but we see it making its way into more website designs as customization becomes easier and more fluid with flexible drag and drop content management system such as Divi, a popular WordPress theme.
Bobby Reed – CEO at Capitol Tech Solutions
In 2020, the biggest web design trend in WordPress will be the new feature of WordPress blocks. By using new features, such as block appenders, web designers can create new web designs faster. Another new feature in WordPress recently released is Changes in Columns blocks. Again, this makes creating column blocks easier and allows web designers through a visual interface to change the column width, or select from a predefined layout of the block. Each version of WordPress adds design features that are allowing web designers to deliver quality websites quicker, reducing the time to come up with great designs, and lowering the cost of web design development. I see this as a trend that will continue into 2020 and beyond for WordPress.
Kat Solukova – Co-founder at Engine Scout
Creative Typography
Typography is subtle, yet a crucial centerpiece of any WordPress web design. You will see a lot of creative typefaces, oversized text elements and effects such as glitch and animated typography trending in 2020. Additionally, you will see typography being embedded into hero images, think of the famous Hollywood sign embedded in the hills.
Sections Scrolling Themes
Instead of parallax scrolling, you will see section scrolling instead, which I believe will replace parallax scrolling completely. Section scrolling allows a smoother and more user-friendly experience. With section scrolling, you scroll one section at a time whereas with parallax you are moving the entire page down or back up. You will see more and more WordPress themes implementing section scrolling in 2020.
Shapes, Layers, and Shadows
You will be seeing a lot more creative shapes, layers and shadows in 2020. These elements work beautifully with minimalist designs where you can make any creative shape or photo cut-out to appear as if it pops out towards you in a 3D kind of experience. This is a simple yet, trending design strategy where designers are adding additional layering and shadows to create these effects. Visually, these elements can be mind-blowing and can take your web design to a new level.
Jeffrey Barroga – Senior Digital Marketing Officer at Paxful
Mass Adoption of Load Speed Plugins
Fast website load speed will be mandatory in 2020. Several studies about website conversion rates found that users expect a page to load within three seconds or less. Aside from conversion rates and user experience, page speed also plays a factor in search engine rankings. Google announced in 2018 that fast-loading websites are looked on more favorably than their slow loading counterparts.
Page speed optimization plugins, especially Autoptimize and WPRocket, will become an integral part of WordPress websites as they can fix almost all issues that appear on Google Page Speed Insight and GTMetrix. Image compression plugins, like ShortPixel and Smush, will also be mainstays as they can reduce image file sizes in bulk AND serve images in the new WEBP format.
Colorful Minimalist Design
A minimalist design (also called “flat design”) is best suited as it requires fewer resources (Javascript, CSS, images, or videos) to make a website look pretty. Minimalism isn’t new, yet it’s still very popular as websites using this design philosophy look modern and classy. In 2020, expect to see more websites with colorful minimalist designs using bold and bright hues as background coupled with maxi typography and line art elements.
Night and Day Mode
According to a study from the National Sleep Foundation, 55% of American generation Z’ers and 47% of generation Y’ers browse the web almost every night for an hour before they go to sleep. This means that millions of internet users are suffering from eye strain due to bright backgrounds and blue light from their screen when browsing in their dark bedroom. Web designers and UX professionals are realizing this problem and that’s why in 2020, websites that give users an option to enable night/dark website theme will be popular.
Grzegorz Rogoziński: The CEO of Cut2Code
WordPress 5 and Gutenberg are the biggest trends for 2020. Websites modular creation enables the construction of interactive and well-designed pages without specialist technical knowledge about website building. You can see it as ‘drag and drop’ – creating pages using elements that build the page. What is important, it reduces production time and costs. Fewer resources allow a website to load faster. Creating own blocks on Gutenberg decreases the weight of the service because no unnecessary libraries are downloaded that are usually added by flat builders. Moreover, it allows an easier optimization for voice search and voice transcripts, so it is a win-win situation.
Matt Diggity – CEO of Diggity Marketing
I believe 2020 will bring major changes in WordPress Designs and most notably are:
Making sites to which users can talk to:
Yes, voice search trend is increasing, and designers are molding WordPress sites according to this trend. We will see the “mic” icon often in the search bar of WordPress websites. In 2020 premium voice plugins will play a vital role in this regard. The web team will be focusing much on voice search SEO.
Vivid colors on the home page:
Designers will use bright colors on the homepage to grab the user’s attention. Along with this, they will also use animated elements. These things grab the user’s attention and make them stay on a page. It has two benefits – the user starts exploring website and SEO score increases because of users’ more extended stay.
Charlotte Ang – Consultant at Orbital Fusion Technologies
WordPress recognizes the importance of visual aids and how it helps capture and retain user attention. It has been steadily building and improving its native Visual editor for adding and editing visual aids, coming with a built-in media uploader to handle images, audio, and video files.
Furthermore, WordPress supports oEmbed enabled websites that allow you to embed media links such as Instagram photos, Soundcloud audio, Tweets, and YouTube videos. The process is as simple as pasting the URL in the WordPress post editor.
It has also shored up its support for plugins that help with building or editing visuals, often by offering more options and customizations that its native editor does not cover. An example is the Visual Composer Website Builder which provides a drag-and-drop way of adding and creating visuals.
Following their efforts, creating and supporting tools that make visual aid implementation an easier and more seamless process is likely to be a trend in 2020 – users are more likely to utilize platforms that have better and more comprehensive tools.
Jeremy Harrison – Founder of Hustle Life
In 2020, I can see different WordPress Design Trends are going to play an essential role in the web market. But, Augment & Virtual Reality will gain immense popularity in WordPress design and features.
As we see, WordPress has already introduced VR, 360-degree photos, and videos feature to create and publish VR content by using its plugin. In 2020, the market of VR audience is expected to grow exponentially; in parallel to this growth, we will also witness AR and VR as leading web design trend of WordPress.
The virtual reality-enabled websites will allow its viewers to make a 3D tour of their business services and products. VR in WordPress does not need to have a piece of equipment related to hardware; its premium plugins will instead do it by mere scrolling of the mouse. I think VR and AR are one of the most revolutionized and best ways to create a website, particularly a video or photo-based.
Conclusion
We hope these WordPress web design trends will inspire you to experiment more in 2020! Good luck and have fun!
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
