2020 has already started fast in the WordPress industry. Since the first half of 2019 brought us the major 5.0 version update, naturally. It was expected from 2020 to be steady and to follow the block-based web page patterns.
The Gutenberg editor did great work on providing a more intuitive website-building experience. We already saw this years ago with the first progress of WordPress when completely basic themes started popping up with super intuitive blog designs.
Well, some believe that basic designs are having their comeback while others say that we are deep in custom designs to allow the simplicity to overcome all the previous theme developing efforts. Let’s discuss 3 main trends and figure out what we can expect from 2020:
Multipurpose Themes – It’s all about sustainability
Multipurpose themes are good for a variety of reasons. Firstly, they are good for developers – those themes can cover more branches and be reused multiple times. Secondly, they are good for magazine sites or for news sites – the homepage design can be easily changed and the site identity can follow new trends super fast and easy.
Those themes also provide a kind of uniform used experience – since they are widely used through the web, and users are likely to see more sites designed or developed in this way. So they are user-friendly.
The bad side is a monotony that they easily slip into. Too much of the similar can become the same after a while. So reuse of multipurpose themes and same patterns in development can make www place of a lot of boring and dull sites, if overused.
Now with a bunch of organizations opting for WordPress for business website development, there is a high possibility that this feature will sky-rocket in 2020.
Integration of Live Chat and Chat Bots – The ultimate need for human touch
Although we all love technology and adopt its new outcomes pretty fast, recently it became obvious that technology is fun but can’t replace humans. Processes are becoming more and more optimized and mistakes are going to become a statistical error, still, some things can be speeded up or finally finished only if there is live chat support. This is obvious especially in the finance industry, where payment has to be done fast and where support is mandatory. Since emails are widely used when we want to deal with some questions or problems, emails can be not quite fast means of communication – so welcome the new star: Live Chat and Chat Bots!
In the WP industry, those functions are added to any theme by installing certain plugins. Any well-educated WordPress designer will work on including live chat in theme for a certain industry. Companies are also working on having live chat implemented and optimized for their type of business.
The Rise of Mobile-First WP Themes
Everybody is on their mobile today. All of our colleagues, parents, friends, cousins, kids and even grandparents are overusing their smartphones. Everybody looks over for mobile than desktop, therefore mobile users have surpassed desktop users and it will become more obvious in the next few years.
This is definitely changing the game in WP theme designs. Responsive is mandatory for years, but the main stage was a desktop or MacBook. Now it is a smartphone, and design has to follow it in terms to give users what they really need.
What we can predict from here is that we would see mobile-friendly WordPress themes and it would be the leading trend in WordPress trends in 2020.
There is no simple answer on which type of theme is going to rule 2020. But there are certain predictions on growth of usage of plugins, multipurpose themes, blog-based designs, and human touch. We should embrace those and find out where they can lead us in the next five years from this spot.
