Web development is a dynamic and progressive field that keeps on changing as new technologies emerge. In the year 2020, web development will witness a plethora of possibilities that will set new trends.

In 2020, web developers will adopt new technologies, experiment with new techniques and reinvent previous techniques. At the same time, some web development trends of previous years won’t go away and will continue in the year 2020 and beyond.

Smart businesses look forward to new technologies and try to follow the emerging trends that can provide them a competitive edge. To build up-to-date products, businesses should hire web developers that keep themselves abreast of latest web development trends and technologies.

Here are the web development trends to watch out in 2020 –

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

A progressive web app is a web app that makes use of the latest web capabilities to provide an app-like experience. Progressive web apps are being considered as the next big thing for the users of the mobile web.

A progressive web app combines the best of both web and mobile apps. You can consider it as a website that acts and feels like a mobile app. Experts define progressive web apps as responsive, connectivity-independent, safe, linkable, re-engageable and app-like web experiences.

Pinterest saw a 60% increase in core engagements and 50% increase in ad click-throughs when it replaced its mobile website with a progressive web app.

Whether it is an eCommerce company getting Magento 2 web development for PWA or any other similar progressive web app, this trend will definitely stay strong in the year. 

Chatbots

A chatbot is a piece of software that processes and simulates human conversation. It allows people to interact with devices, apps or websites. A chatbot can be just a basic program that replies to a simple query or it may be a complex piece of software that can provide a high level of personalization to users.

To deliver responses to requests, chatbots make use of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML). For businesses, chatbots enhance operational efficiency and save money. As many customer queries can be easily answered by chatbots, businesses require less number of customer service professionals.

According to Gartner, by the year 2021, artificial intelligence will be used to completely handle 15% of customer service interactions occurring worldwide. By the year 2022, about 70% of white-collar professionals will engage every day with conversational platforms.

WebAssembly

WebAssembly, also known as Wasm, has been designed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in order to enable high performance applications on the web. It is a portable binary instruction format for high-level languages’ compilation.

It is part of the open web platform, and is safe, efficient, fast and debuggable. As WebAssembly is a virtual instruction set architecture, it can be used in diverse cases and in many different environments. In December 2019, WebAssembly became a W3C recommendation. It is the fourth language to run natively in web browsers along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Single Page Applications (SPAs)

A single-page application (SPA) is a web app that loads as a single page and does not require loading of whole new pages. The content is loaded into the page dynamically. A user gets a smooth experience, free from any interruption, just like a desktop application. Common examples of SPAs are Gmail, Facebook, etc.

There is no extra wait time as the user visits just one web page and all the other content is loaded into this same page. Single-page applications (SPAs) offer many benefits such as fast loading, simplified development, easy debugging, reusability of same backend code for mobile app development, effective caching of any local data, and offline functioning.  

Motion UI

By using motion UI, a web development company is able to provide a superb user experience. Motion UI increases customer engagement with websites and apps. It can include a number of elements such as shapes, photos, text, 3D objects, illustrations, lines, videos, etc.

Motion UI finds use in a variety of settings such as welcoming users, system status and notifications, refreshing content, navigations and transitions, feedbacks, results of actions, acknowledgments, etc. It provides awesome experience to users and leaves a positive effect on the users’ minds. Motion UI is quite in trend and will remain so in 2020, as web and mobile app development companies are increasingly using it.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are technically HTML copies of existing webpages. They are lightweight, stripped-down and fast-loading pages. AMP technology makes use of stripped-down HTML, stripped-down JS, and a content delivery network (CDN) that is optimized to cache pages and to adapt them to accelerated mobile pages (AMP) code.

AMP technology significantly enhances the performance of the mobile web. With AMP, people using mobile devices to access content get significantly fast page load times. By using AMP, mobile-friendliness of websites increases. 

In May 2017, the number of domains using AMP was 900,000. In early 2018, this number rose to 31 million domains. This means an increase of more than 34 times. AMP is trending as more and more domains are adopting it.

Voice Search

Voice search is a technology that allows users to speak into a device to generate results. This is in sharp contrast to typing keywords into a search box and hitting the Enter key. This technology makes use of speech recognition program to understand users’ words accurately so that appropriate results can be delivered.

Some of the examples of voice search technology that are in use include Google Assistant, Siri from Apple, Cortana from Microsoft, Alexa from Amazon, etc. Voice search significantly improves user experience, and that is why more and more websites are being optimized for it.

According to Comscore, by the year 2020, 50% of all online searches will be performed with voice search. According to Gartner, by the year 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%.

JavaScript and Python

According to Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey 2019, for the last seven years, JavaScript has been continuously ranked as the most commonly used programming language. Python has emerged as the fastest-growing major programming language.

Both JavaScript and Python are used by web and mobile app developers. Python offers benefits such as numerous third-party modules, vast library, easy to learn, user-friendly data structures, community-driven development and support, etc. Interestingly, the versatility of Python extends to various industries, like real estate where developers leverage Python Zillow scrapers. it's also used in finance, healthcare, and retail for data analysis and automation on Bloomberg for finance, Healthgrades for healthcare, and many other platforms.

The main reason for JavaScript’s popularity is that it offers many advantages such as it is very fast, compilation on the client side is not required, simple to learn, easy to implement, compatible with other languages, can be used in a vast variety of applications, can be used in any webpage, can be included in scripts written in other languages, reduces load on website server, etc. Businesses can hire JavaScript developers to build top-notch web and mobile apps.    

The above technologies that will trend in the year 2020 will have transformative impact on the web development industry. By leveraging the most suitable trending technology, a business can create powerful websites and apps that can provide enhanced user experience and help boost business productivity.

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