Websites that use a Content Management System tend to choose WordPress as their platform. As a well-known brand that has consistently innovated over the years, it is maintaining its dominant market position despite stiff competition from platforms such as HubSpot CMS, website builders such as Wix and eCommerce platforms such as BigCommerce.
Despite the recent upheaval in the WordPress community involving Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, we expect the WordPress ecosystem to continue to thrive. The large community of developers, plugins, premium themes, and innovations of the platform will drive this Content Management System into the future.
Let’s take a look at the WordPress trends set to shape the ecosystem in the future.
Full Site Editing (FSE) Evolution
In recent times, there have been significant improvements in the Gutenberg block editor. The focus has been not only on end-user experience, but on developer experience (DX) as well. For example, the following WordPress trends have made it more intuitive to work on WordPress development services.
- Developers are no longer constrained by platform capabilities, only by their imaginations. Developers can create complex site-wide layouts, save, and reuse them.
- The ability to display conditional content on websites improved, with more granular controls.
- The Menu component APIs have been changed to add three granular sub-components: menu trigger button, submenu trigger item, menu popover. This allows developers more leeway.
- Becoming a front-end expert is easier with ongoing enhancements to the Style Book. Dedicated sections for typography, colors, and individual blocks get activated upon user navigation to these items.
- Increasingly, WordPress trends necessitate websites to display dynamic content. Within Gutenberg blocks, user-defined custom fields can be effortlessly linked sans coding input.
Other trends in WordPress are emerging with most themes being built as block themes rather than traditional PHP templates. Besides this, the distinction between posts, pages, and other content types is becoming more fluid through FSE.
Performance Focus WordPress Trend
WordPress can only maintain its leading market position through high-performance. The community of developers understands this and works diligently to improve performance to stay as the top choice of website owners worldwide.
Site administrators can ensure Core Web Vitals optimization through either its in-built Site Health dashboard or more commonly, through 3rd party plugins. We predict that the platform’s own SEO/health features will be improved in future updates.
A major WordPress trend is a performance improvement effort to reduce the JavaScript payload transmitted to users. Developers ensure the code contains only necessary characters to make the JavaScript as efficient as possible.
A second technique toward this end is using Gzip Compression of the JavaScript code. This is a data compression feature available in modern browsers, so compressed files from the server can be read and executed by the user’s browser.
Finally, developers will improve the user experience further by innovating implementation of lazy-loading, utilizing content delivery networks, and ‘tree-shaking’ – getting rid of unused JavaScript code.
Screenshot: The WordPress Site Health Info Feature.
More Diverse Rendering Techniques WordPress Trend
A growing number of websites will utilize the technique of server-side rendering which involves making use of the Angular, Vue.js, React and other JavaScript frameworks to deliver Single Page Applications. This means a page rendered by the server is sent to the user, and subsequently, content is dynamically updated instead of reloading the entire page.
However, server-side rendering (SSR) can increase costs for the website owners. If the data stream is high-bandwidth, it could actually make the website load slower due to frequent server requests. A relatively new ‘hybrid-rendering’ technique is now in vogue.
It allows a first contentful paint via server-side rendering, with the client-side taking over hydration after that. This delivers the SEO benefits of SSR, while allowing responsiveness of Client-Side Rendering.
Headless WordPress
Allowing the Marketing team to use WordPress for the backend content editing work while enabling the developers to use a front-end stack of their choice with their own Git workflow is a great option. The ‘Headless’ architecture is constructed by using a plugin like Gatsby or popular frameworks like Next.js and Remix.
For the data layer, the default REST API is good enough for most websites. For higher traffic or complex websites, this API’s querying capabilities seem limited, however. Work is ongoing to enhance REST API to better support headless implementations.
WPGraphQL then emerges as the solution with more flexible querying and reduced over-fetching.
The Headless implementation of WordPress improves security because it uses JSON Web Tokens instead of cookies as in the traditional WordPress setups. The Token storage is secure as is the refresh mechanism. Explicit expiration times are set for the Tokens.
While measures such as input validation on all endpoints on the API layer, data sanitization and validation, and precautions against SQL injections work well to ensure Headless WordPress security currently, the rise of quantum computing in the near future will necessitate higher level, innovative security measures.
Developing for Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality
While the hype behind Apple’s Vision Pro may have died down a bit, mixed reality headsets will no doubt gain popularity in the coming years. As spatial computers shed weight, consumers will find them more comfortable to wear for extended periods during their work day or during leisure hours.
WordPress trends indicate that websites will need to adapt to this new medium of delivery and design posts and themes that utilize these displays to the maximum. Imagine a user on your WooCommerce website being able to pull out an image of the luxury handbag you’re selling and examining it in deep 3D detail. Imagine a website that is so immersive that a user is literally inside of it, like a brick-and-mortar mega store.
Wrapping Up: Exciting WordPress Trends Ahead
Predicting the future is never an exact science. We’ve highlighted the recent WordPress trends which will likely accelerate in the future, and some trends that will emerge in the near future. We hope you found this blog post insightful. Did we miss any drifts and currents in the WordPress industry?
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