Websites are getting better, faster, and more attractive year after year. As the entire web development industry is evolving, webmasters keep finding new ways to improve both the functionality and the design of their sites.

This is a critical step as almost 50% of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business. In other words, you absolutely have to follow cutting-edge web development solutions to make your site more appealing in the long run.

But there is a thin and very subtle line between finding the best new models of work and pushing it to the point of no return. If you want to preserve professional authority, you need to skip redundant novelties. In this post, we will show you nine web development trends you should avoid in 2020.

1. Give Presentation Priority over Performance

The first impression is always the most important, which is why so many developers focus primarily on creating an eye-pleasing website. This is a logical point of view, but it has become way too aggressive and counterproductive because it jeopardizes the overall experience of visitors.

We strongly recommend you to avoid the trend because it might fend off too many users. According to the report, 88% of users will never return to a website after a poor user experience. If your goal is to grow an army of loyal visitors, then don’t give presentation priority over performance, but rather try to make a natural balance between the two elements of web development.

Take a popular online retail store called ShareASale for example. When you land on their homepage, you probably won’t be thrilled with what you find there. The site is packed with numerous features that might seem strange and redundant, but the goal of the website is to display the main eCommerce categories straight away.

Therefore, ShareASale prioritizes performance because they want to seal as many deals as possible. This should be your objective as well, so don’t forget to focus on the core idea of your business.

2. Intrusive Visual Components

The second trend goes hand in hand with the previous one. If you surf the Internet long enough, you will realize that a large portion of sites rely on heavy visuals in the attempt to impress their audiences. While it is true that image carousels, animations, and videos can make the webpage more compelling, you have to know that it can also be annoying and even slow down the entire website.

Take a look at Forbes for example. Although being one of the most popular business magazines globally, the website often disturbs users with auto-play videos. It’s only fair to say that Forbes can obviously afford it, but you probably can’t and so you should skip intrusive visual components.

If you are really eager to add a dynamic component to the homepage, we recommend you to do it like GAP. A popular fashion brand uses an image carousel to showcase the latest products, but they added a nice tweak to the concept.

Namely, the carousel is actually static, which means that website visitors can determine whether to move the slider or not. Although it forces users to take the extra step, at least they get to make the decision and consume the content the way they want it to.

3. Neglect Page Load Speed

If there is only one thing people hate the most, it would probably be a slow-running website. Although users expect websites to open within three seconds, the average page load time is a staggering 10.27 seconds.

Needless to say, such an underperformance won’t get you too far and you better solve the problem if you are dealing with it. How can you do it?

The answer lies in website optimization tools such as Pingdom. With this platform at your disposal, you can quickly analyze the domain and identify the features that are reducing page load speed. Pingdom will also give you recommendations on how to resolve issues and make your site lightning fast.

How does the platform function? The process is fairly simple as all you need to do is copy a website link and paste it to Pingdom URL box. Besides that, you can choose the location from which you would like to test the page load speed. So far, you can select one of seven locations in Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Japan.

The platform uses colors to distinguish between different loading issues such as to add expires headers, reduce the number of DOM elements, or avoid empty src or href.

4. Neglect Branding Guidelines

Serious businesses have a carefully-designed branding strategy that applies to every segment of marketing and brand promotion. This goes for websites as well, so it would be foolish not to follow the basic branding guidelines when crafting a site.

Once again, we notice that less agile brands neglect this concept and fail to align web development with the branding strategy.

Your job is to take care of the problem and create pages that contribute to the online visibility of your business. For example, you can see how dissertations services do it. They use bluish tones to emphasize professional authority and add a lot of text to prove proficiency, which is exactly what you would expect from a writing agency.

On the other side, a great example comes from one of the largest brands globally. We are talking about Coca-Cola and its website that completely follows the company’s branding rules.

You can see that the homepage is dominated by red and white, also known as signature colors of Coca-Cola. You instantly get to see their most popular product on a modern and eye-catching image. Although it may seem simple, too many companies fail to follow their own branding styles when developing a website.

5. The Popup Dilemma

Popups are a major topic in web design as there is still no general agreement on whether the concept really works or simply chases the audience away. Here is why:

• Popups definitely annoy people and deteriorate user experience
• The average conversion rate for all pop-ups is 3.09%

The dilemma is obvious – popups bother the vast majority of users, but they still have quite a decent conversion rate. In such circumstances, some developers completely eliminate popups, while others overuse them.

Our suggestion is to keep your popup efforts moderate. Don’t use them on every page, but don’t be afraid of adding popups where it can make a real difference conversion-wise.

Take Jeff Bullas’ website for instance. Jeff is one of the world-famous experts in the field of digital marketing and he is not afraid of using popups on his site. On the contrary, as soon as you open one of the pages on his website, you will notice a popup that encourages you to invite Jeff Bullas to speak at your next event.

Of course, the secret lies in the fact that the popup is rather delicate and discrete, but still impossible to miss. It’s not always easy to create such a perfect combination, but no one can stop you from trying!

6. Desktop-Only Design

The year is 2020 and no one should focus on desktop-only design anymore. Unfortunately, you can still bump into poorly-optimized sites way too often. This is a huge blunder in the world where over 3.2 billion people use mobile devices.

If you haven’t upgraded your website already, make sure to make it mobile-friendly as soon as possible. All you need to do is to run a Mobile Friendly Test to determine the condition of your website. Google penalizes sites that neglect smartphone experience, so you better do it quickly.

This is not a novelty as mobile-friendliness has been Google’s priority since 2016, but they made the feature even more important in 2020 thanks to the so-called mobile-first indexing. What does it mean?

According to Google, mobile-first indexing means that this search engine predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking: “Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Googlebot primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent going forward.”

7. Go Crazy about JavaScript Frameworks

JavaScript offers you a whole bunch of interesting frameworks, with some of the most popular solutions being Angular, Vue, and React. JS frameworks give web developers a wide range of highly practical functionalities such as:

• Accelerated coding: Instead of writing a set of lines from scratch, you can use a predefined framework component to make the process simpler and faster.
• Data-binding: With JS frameworks, you can establish data connections using intuitive shortcuts.
• Optimal performance: JS frameworks are almost always very small files. This means they can function perfectly regardless of your demands and coding activities.

These are all very valuable additions to the JavaScript foundation, but don’t go crazy about it too early in the process. On the contrary, you should first try to build an impenetrable JavaScript structure before turning to its frameworks. That way, you won’t have to worry about possible performance issues and long-term bugs on your websites.

8. SEO: Set It and Forget It

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a well-known concept and it’s hard to imagine a web developer or content creator who fails to customize the content so as to match the expectations of search engine algorithms. There is, however, another trend among webmasters and that is to “set it and forget it.”

What does it mean?

It means they conduct a one-time optimization process and never come back to it again. For example, some content creators are still using an obsolete tactic called keyword stuffing. By definition, keyword stuffing refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results.

What these webmasters don’t know that Google’s algorithms are able to recognize keyword stuffing very quickly, which means that the whole concept falls apart instantly. Fast forward to 2020 and you will see that keyword stuffing can only hurt the reputation and the ranking of your site.

You should be smarter than that and know that Google changes its algorithms 500 to 600 times a year. In such circumstances, SEO demands continuous upgrades. This is the situation in which you must follow trends and use state of the art optimization mechanisms to make your site discoverable.

9. Not Asking for Help

The last tip on our list is simple, but web developers rarely ever use it. Our advice is to ask for help in case you are having problems with your website or if you are not sure how to solve a specific issue. Don’t rely on your guts, but rather try to keep things professional all the way until the end. It will make your website function flawlessly and help you to preserve professional reputation.

After all, this is probably the main reason why you are reading this post. It’s a very good way to start, but there are many other resources to consult if you are having trouble with any concept or strategy in particular.

All you have to do is do the homework and find the most reliable blogs, seminars, key opinion leaders, data libraries, or any other type of resource that can help you solve the riddle. It takes a little more work than usual, but you will end up creating a better product eventually.

Conclusion

Web development has become a fundamental industry because websites’ appearance and functionality have the power to make or break entire businesses. In such circumstances, it is necessary to follow the latest web development initiatives but also to identify trends that won’t make a lasting positive impact on users.

In this post, we showed you nine web development trends you should try to avoid in 2020. Have you ever used any of these tactics already? Feel free to write a comment as we would love to see your web development experiences!