With more than 76 million websites (26% of the total websites over the internet) powered by it and over 59% CMS (Content Management System) market share, WordPress continues to rule the web and the CMS world.
After thirteen years of the first release of WordPress, every year it is getting more powerful, user-friendly and popular among the newbies and non-techy group. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, makes sure it happens every time.
In 2016, several new WordPress web trends took the world by surprise, like hamburger menus and one-page (parallax) themes, slowly raised while many other old trends, such as sidebars and sliders, become more mundane.
How will these new changes affect WordPress development in 2017? What should you need to know when building a new WordPress website in 2017? Let’s have a look.
Nowadays, more people are accessing the internet through their smartphones or tablets compared to desktops and laptops as it is more convenient and easy to use for any user around the globe. According to data from a global internet usage statistics report, mobile devices now holds 51.26% of market share while desktop devices have fallen down to 48.74%. Certainly Mobile is the future!
The use of mobile in search points out to one thing that is certainly going to happen, now people have to make sure that mobile optimization is mandatory. In fact, even Google is now giving special treatment for mobile-first websites. In November 2016, the search cum web giant started experiments to make its index mobile-first.
“Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.”
Mobile-first websites are going to take the lead in 2017 as far as the optimization in WordPress is concerned. Now, WordPress developers put more weight into their themes for mobile responsiveness rather than sticking to that old trend of fitting and testing everything for the larger screen version of the theme.
With Google’s aggressive and strict push toward secured websites and HTTPS everywhere, even self-hosted WordPress users are now forced to use HTTPS to avoid being tagged as an “unsafe” website in the eyes of the user.
The trend to be followed in 2017, HTTPS will be compulsory for all websites, including those which are powered by WordPress in 2017.
Even though this means more painful work for website developers and owners, HTTPS will help develop a more secure web while providing better security for users, especially if your website is an eCommerce website.
Completing HTTP to HTTPS phase is not at all easy. If you’re building a new WordPress site in 2017, you better Implement HTTPS for your WordPress site at the initial phase since it is really a tedious process at the later stage.
Video headers are going to be in trend in 2017. WordPress recently launched it’s newest themes twenty seventeen, which includes video header and that is the future of themes in 2o17.
Video headers aren’t that uncommon and we’ve seen them a lot many times on different websites but taking WordPress themes into the account, it is going to be a new experience for many a user to implement video header themes onto their websites for the more attractive look. consider it a trendsetter in WordPress industry.
In 2017, you can expect to see more WordPress themes with video headers.
People wants to get best out of the money they spent, even if it is a WordPress Theme, and that is the main reason behind the popularity of multipurpose theme among the WordPress Developers and Users.
A multipurpose theme allows you to build any type or style of a website with all the features you want on the website. The highly customizable option that multipurpose theme provides are of great use and offers a lot of other options for the user’s to make more personalized theme according to their services or need.
Since more businesses and companies now consider WordPress to affordably build their business websites, we can expect to see a rise in demand for multipurpose themes in WordPress in 2017.
Aftereffects of these new trends can make WordPress theme frameworks, like Genesis, more popular and we can anticipate more of these kinds of platforms in the near future.
Over the past few years, we saw loads of new WordPress plugins being developed as SaaS (Software as a Service) plugins while older WordPress plugins which were standalone made the jump to using SaaS.
In terms of open-source software development and making WordPress plugins more affordable, the rise in SaaS plugins can be a massive blow to new WordPress users.
However, it does give us the opportunity to use better and more advanced software, such as SumoMe and OptinMonster.
For user’s who can afford to pay for the advanced and high-quality software, money is not an issue. As we also felt that most of the stand-alone WordPress plugins have many flaws and they can pose some serious security threats to your website.
This really boosted up the SaaS-based WordPress plugin development, which is going to cover the market in 2017. But, don’t worry, standalone plugin developers still has a chance to succeed, thanks to massive marketplaces like CodeCanyon and Creative Market.
Virtual reality headsets, such as Oculus Rift and Gear VR, are more than just about gaming. It’s really the future that we all are looking forward to, even to access the web or doing Google search for any of our niche queries. Yes, it is nearer that we think it is. Who know’s maybe by the end of this year, we’ll be entering into this virtual world.
With Facebook-owned Oculus Rift and Samsung’s Gear VR already in stores, VR technology is being adapted by many people. As a result of this rapid growth, Samsung recently released a web browser optimized for Gear VR for viewing the web.
It is going to be a new experience altogether for the people.
VR headsets optimized WordPress websites? You’ll have to ask yourself that question, very soon.
Even though virtual reality headsets are currently being used for gaming and watching videos, soon (and possibly by 2017) we will use it for many other activities, including posting photos on Instagram, updating status on Facebook, browsing the web, and much more. Could 2017 prove to be that futuristic year when it all finally happens as we used to see in sci-fi movies as kids?
Looking at the love people are showing towards WordPress, we can only imagine the unexpected that is yet to come from WordPress as many great minds across the globe are using, supporting and contributing towards WordPress and one thing is certain, WordPress is not going anywhere but up the ladder and you can expect great things from the CMS for many years to come.
We, at Weblizar, started implementing the changes and we are positive that we’ll amaze you with our creativity and all new set of ideas.
Hope you enjoyed reading the article.
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Nice post! Adding it to my buffer account to share this week.
Thanks for spreading knowledge Jim, totally appreciate it.