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7 Web Development Trends CTOs Should Be Aware of in 2021

Author: Vitaly Kuprenko

Development trends change pretty fast. For tech specialists, it’s essential to stay informed for sharpening the knowledge, while for decision-makers being up-to-date means withstanding a competition.

To help you grasp the web development trends for 2021, we’ve analyzed the market demands across different industries and the latest web development trends.

Here’s a quick list of what we’ve got:

 

  • Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
  • Intelligent chatbots
  • Responsive websites
  • Optimization for voice search
  • API-first design
  • Web push notifications

Progressive Web Apps or PWA

It’s probably one of the most meaningful trends of recent years. It’s aimed to make the experience that users get from browsing a website closer to native mobile applications. Therefore, more user-friendly and intuitive.

 

In simple words, PWA is a website offering features that usually accessible on mobile natives apps. Push notifications, offline mode, access to a camera are among those features.

 

A plethora of case studies shows that companies get an increase in revenue, conversion rates, and user engagements after adopting the PWA. The launch of the PWA resulted in two times more daily active users for Starbucks, while Trivago saw an increase of 150% for users who add its PWA to the home screen.

 

PWA let developers improve aspects that users hate about websites: slow load, no hardware support, poor user experience.

Companies Using the PWA

You can find the following companies among those who are already making use of PWA:

  • Alaska Airlines
  • Twitter
  • Starbucks
  • Trivago
  • Uber
  • Pinterest
  • Spotify


 

Tech Aspect

You may want to use one of the following technologies to build a PWA:

  • Polymer
  • Angular
  • React
  • Vue

 

One more thing that makes PWA a worthy investment is that they take up to four times less time to develop than native apps for iOS and Android.

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages is the technology that Google first presented to the public in 2015. It has been keeping the position of the hotly debated web development trends since then.

In short, the AMP helps to build web pages that load insanely fast and work smoothly across a variety of mobile devices. Accelerated Mobile Pages load for about 2 seconds in comparison to up to 22 seconds for regular ones.


 

Google pays a lot of attention to the load speed when deciding how to rank them in SERP. It means that the AMP technology is also remarkably useful for building a healthy SEO.

Tech Aspect

To get started with accelerated pages, you should learn more about an open-source HTML framework built for this purpose on the official website. There, you’ll find documentation and everything else you may need to get started.

Intelligent Chat Bots

For those businesses working across multiple time zones and having a presence in different countries and continents, it’s essential to provide customers with timely support.

 

Human customer services are often costly and don’t provide the necessary 24/7 support, unlike chatbots. That’s why entrepreneurs wonder how to build a chatbot that’d cover their needs making it another web development trend for 2021.

 

The chatbots powered with machine learning has been a worthy replacement for humans in many customer support tasks. Chatbots can give answers to frequently asked questions, redirect users to the right customer support specialist, and even take an order.

 

What’s more, a recent study shows that 65% of customers feel comfortable handling an issue without a customer support specialist.

Tech Aspect

There are several open-source solutions that can help you build an intelligent chatbot faster:

 

Responsive Websites

Responsiveness is no longer a nice-to-have feature. It’s now a must-to-have feature for every website on the Internet. It has been a trend for many years and 2021 isn’t an exception.

 

Taking into account that an overwhelming number of users prefers mobile devices over desktops and regarding Google’s recent mobile-first indexing policies, there’s no other way to succeed on the Internet except for being responsive.

Optimization for Voice Search

The voice search has an ever-rising potential that businesses simply can’t ignore. The last year’s report shows that more than half of all smartphone users were using the voice search in 2020. This number is going to grow exponentially.

 

Bearing in mind the current state of voice search and its perspectives, it’s definitely a web development trend for this year. Companies will start losing money without adding voice search to their SEO strategy and providing the IT budget for it.

Tech Aspect

The Web Speech API from Mozilla can help you with this task. The API helps to recognize the voice context, respond to queries, and read text content.

API-First Design

With the rise of digital services and their connectivity with one another, API-first design has become a widespread web dev elopement approach. And it’s still a trend.

 

With the traditional development approach, teams rather focus on delivering a smoothly working app and pay little attention to an API. APIs are often perceived as side projects and might not be designed and tested properly.

 

The API-first development, unlike the traditional one, goes simultaneously so that one part of the team doesn’t have to wait until colleagues finish their part of work.


 

Tech Aspects

Here are some popular tools for developing a high-level API:

Web Push Notifications

Push notifications used to be a privilege of mobile apps for a long time. However, web apps with push notifications gain momentum. Push notifications on websites can be used for informing about a new blog post, telling that a thing you were interested in is back in stock, and many other situations.

Tech Aspects

There are plenty of tools on the market that can help you integrate push notifications:

Wrapping Up

So, we have the following web development trends for 2021:

 

  1. Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
  2. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
  3. Intelligent chatbots
  4. Responsive websites
  5. Optimization for voice search
  6. API-first design
  7. Web push notifications

 

If you’re building a new product or going to update the old one, it may be a good idea to identify what trends are right for you to start preparations.

 

Author’s bio

 

Vitaly Kuprenko is a writer for Cleveroad. It’s a web and mobile app development company with headquarters in Ukraine. He enjoys writing about technology and digital marketing.

What is AMP and does your website need it?

Author: Sean H.

Jessica Kane takes over our blog this month to discuss AMP. Thanks Jessica!

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project allows web developers to create smooth, fast-loading web pages. Created by Google in 2015, the original goal of AMP was to improve the experience of browsing the web on a mobile phone. Today, most users interact with AMP through Google search results, although Facebook has also developed a similar platform, known as Instant Articles.

The 3 Components of AMP Pages

AMP can be broken down into three core components: AMP HTML, AMP JS, and AMP Cache.

AMP HTML is basically the normal HTML programming language used by web developers all over the world with a few changes. Namely, AMP HTML adds some restrictions to traditional HTML in an effort to provide a more reliable performance. Additionally, AMP HTML also has its own unique features such as AMP-specific tags that enable unsupported features in browsers.

Much like AMP HTML, the goal of AMP JS is to improve the performance and speed of mobile web browsing. Specifically, AMP JS is focused on rendering web pages as quickly as possible. One of the key areas of optimization for AMJ pages is that AMP JS forces everything on the page to load asynchronously, which means one part of the page that is loading slowly will not slow down other aspects of the page.

Finally, AMP Cache is another key ingredient of the AMP platform that serves cached versions of AMP pages. AMP Cache improves loading speeds and reliability by serving cached versions of web pages that have been pre-validated to load properly to site visitors.

Who Uses AMP?

Due to the heavy use of AMP in Google Search, AMP was able to obtain 7 percent of all traffic to top publishers in the United States by early 2017, roughly a year after the project was officially launched. By May 2017, 900,000 different web domains were publishing AMP pages. The growth of AMP took another major leap in the summer of 2017 when Twitter started to link to AMP pages from their mobile apps.

Any third party is able to integrate in to the AMP platform as long as they comply with the protocol specifications. For example, 30 analytics companies and 120 advertising companies have participated in the AMP Project, building their own features along the way.

AMP has been so successful that even some of Google’s key competitors, such as Bing and Baidu, now link to AMP pages. Other major websites that link to AMP pages include Reddit, LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr, eBay, and Pinterest.

One of the key reasons for the massive adoption of AMP by the online publishing world (in addition to fast loading times) is that these types of pages also cut down on the amount of data people use when they’re not connected to a Wi-Fi router. By cutting away a lot of the junk, such as pop-ups, that are associated with the desktop browsing experience, web developers are able to also lower the literal cost of loading a page in terms of the effect on site visitors’ monthly mobile phone bill.

Does Your Website Need AMP?

At this point, AMP has become the way in which web browsing works best on mobile devices. Google has indicated that AMP pages sourced from Google Search results will load in less than one second. Third party reviews from CNBC and Gizmodo have also found large improvements in loading times when compared to traditional web pages.

To give users a user-friendly browsing experience on their mobile devices, especially when they’re visiting a website for the first time, implementing AMP is basically a requirement these days. With AMP, anyone who has their own website for business or personal reasons can be sure no one is going to change their mind about viewing a site while waiting for it to load.

Jessica Kane is a professional blogger who focuses on personal finance and other money matters. She currently writes for Checkworks.com, where you can get personal checks and business checks.