Web Development Trends

For many companies building a web application is a direct way to reach wider audiences, successful business expansion, and quick revenue growth. However, to reap all these benefits over the years, companies have to hold a high bar for their apps and effectively meet both – their business and customer requirements. That’s why so many of them closely follow the latest trends in web application development and constantly upgrade their digital solutions with advanced technologies and features.

In this article, we’ll have a look at the current and latest trends in web development and make predictions about which ones are worth implementing in web solutions in 2023.

Top Web Development Trends For 2023

In the IT industry, a wide range of tech trends appear every year. While some of them become massively popular overnight and then go forgotten just as quickly, others last for many years. We’ve analyzed long-lasting and recently emerged web development trends and have composed our top list of the web features and solutions that should be considered when building web applications in 2023.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is an approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and screen sizes.

Such languages as CSS and HTML are used to automatically resize, hide, or enlarge the content to make it look good on various devices including computers, phones, and tablets.

What is more, Google Search Engine ranks websites according to how mobile-friendly they are so this trend shouldn’t be ignored.

Apart from great web application adaptability to various devices, companies should also consider adding Dark Mode to their web solutions. The majority of digital users prefer Dark Mode as it makes reading easier in low light with less eye strain.

Motion UI

Today’s web users are overwhelmed with the information flow, and as a result, their attention spans have dropped significantly. On average, you have only 5 sec to get your customers interested. Therefore, web developers have to implement different web design and development tricks to catch users’ attention.

For example, web designers can use short and informative texts without a need to scroll through and motion UI to make web applications more interactive and user engaging. By introducing amusing animation and graphics, and other design elements, web designers can make web applications and websites more user-friendly and catchy.

Push Notifications

Push notifications are another feature that brings web apps closer to mobile app style. They are already widely used by such companies as Facebook and Google and are being gradually adopted by SMEs.

Push notifications help your customers learn fast about the latest news on your site, without receiving traditional email notifications which are often considered as spam. This way you enhance the user experience of your web app with timely and regular updates and improve your business marketing strategies, ensuring that more customers see your notifications.

Voice Search

Searching for data online with voice is becoming the new normal. More and more users prefer to communicate with virtual voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa rather than type their queries manually.

Voice search has a great impact on the web development industry and web developers have to learn how to add speech recognition to web apps and make them more convenient to use.

Empowered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) voice search is a win-win solution for both customers and web app owners. Clients can save time on searching and ordering more products while business owners can use it as a valuable source of customer behavior analytics.

Therefore, if you want to provide a seamless customer experience on your web app and get customer behavior insights, integration of voice search is a rational solution.

AI Customer Support

About 15 years ago using chatbots for customer support was a painful experience. They were cumbersome and rather simple. However, the reputation of chatbots is quickly improving all thanks to AI and ML technologies. Now, they can use self-learning strategies and adapt to users’ needs, providing 24/7 user assistance.

Many companies use chatbots for customer support, thus saving large amounts of money, and avoiding hiring additional staff while providing great service. Chatbots are successfully integrated into many messengers such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, and Facebook and are used for customer support on various websites.

Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is an advanced technology that underlies the development of various tech branches. They include cryptocurrencies, cybersecurity, web 3.0, decentralized cloud storage, and many others. Therefore, before implementing Blockchain, businesses should seriously consider where and how they want to use it in their web solutions.

The wide utilization of Blockchain in so many diverse tech fields can be explained by the numerous advantages this technology offers. It increases trust among the users, improves security, lowers operational costs, and enhances data transparency and traceability. Many businesses already successfully use Blockchain-based solutions in their web applications.

Internet of Things (IoT) and IoB

Easy access to the Web due to the wide dissemination of WiFi, 4G, and 5G technologies has given impulse to the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT). Today, it’s no longer surprising that many households may have fridges, microwaves, lightbulbs, and other devices connected to the Internet as well. Though, IoT isn’t confined only to Smart Home appliances managed via web and mobile apps, a wide range of industries, businesses, and even farms effectively utilize IoT in their business workflow.

While IoT has been a long-used technology, various companies search for new ways to apply IoT for business development. That’s where IoB comes into play. Internet of Behavior is the next step in the IoT evolution. It aims at analyzing user behavior and adjusting environments, services, and products to the user demand. Companies actively embed IoB into their web solutions to better meet customer expectations, increase sales, and therefore, generate more revenue.

AI and Machine Learning

By the end of 2022, Artificial Intelligence has made a splash in the world of visual design when a new killer feature was presented to the world – AI-generated art. The technology creates artworks based on verbal description or enhances already existing images as if it was made by a real artist. Currently, there are several companies working in the field of AI-based visual art, the most popular ones are DALL-E, ChatGPT, and Lensa AI. Lensa AI has already made $16.2 million in revenue with $8 million generated in December 2022 alone.

It’s predicted that AI-based art apps will become a major app trend in 2023.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) are major technologies used in mobile and web application development and they aren’t limited only to user entertainment. Companies have been long effectively utilizing AI and ML for better personalization of their customer approach, learning more about their customers’ behavioral patterns, automating diverse routine processes, improved error management, prediction of trends, real-time performance analysis, and so much more. The global AI market reached $327.5 bn in 2021 and is expected to grow over $1.5 tln by 2030.

Multi-Experience

Omnichannel business presence when companies promote their brands through various social media platforms and applications has led to the necessity of establishing multi-experience. Multi-experience is when users experience coherent services across various digital touchpoints such as web applications, mobile apps, chatbots, social media platforms, wearable apps, etc. This way, when a customer starts interacting with a brand over one channel, they can seamlessly continue to do that over another.

In 2023, multi-experience will be a major software development trend as the number of touchpoints through which businesses can reach their customers is growing. Therefore, when building their web applications, businesses have to consider multi-experience in their digital solutions. It means creating dynamic web applications that easily adapt to diverse devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearables, digital voice assistants, AR/VR modules, IoT devices, and others.

WebAR and VR

Augmented and virtual realities (AR/VR) are popular technologies that are effectively implemented in practice by many businesses from simple QR code scanning to more complex user entertainment digital games. When companies implement VR/AR elements in their web solutions, they provide their users with quick access to reality-enhancing technologies and improve their communication with brands.

With AR/VR technology, companies can create immersive and interactive user experiences which result in better customer retention and improved buyer awareness about a brand and a product.

Currently, many companies such as Amazon, IKEA, Sephora, MOSCOT, and many others are actively experimenting with AR/VR. One of the recent high-profile examples is the Metaverse by Mark Zuckerberg. Although much of the Metaverse project is still under development, many companies already effectively use AR/VR in their customer approaches. Statista predicts that the global AR/VR/MR market will reach over $250 bn by 2028, whereas the market revenue was estimated at $28 bn in 2021.

Progressive Web Apps

Progressive web apps (PWA) and Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) have faster loading times and, as a result, ranked higher in Google which is especially important for those businesses that care about SEO.

Progressive web apps (PWA) provide their customers with a mobile-like experience, allowing their users to utilize the app even when they have a low internet connection. According to Statista, 65% of online shopping orders were made with the help of mobile devices. It means that PWAs can be particularly beneficial for e-commerce, and those businesses that want to reach a wider audience and provide users with a good user experience even when they are offline.

Single-Page Applications (SPA)

Building web applications using SPA technology is one of the most popular tech trends in web development today. SPAs are JavaScript-based applications that dynamically render web pages to quickly display web content to users. For this, SPAs load markup and data instead of HTML pages from a service. This makes content displaying much faster and such apps provide a smoother and uninterrupted user experience in comparison to traditional web applications.

SPAs are widely used by Google Drive, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and other popular platforms due to their fast continent rendering, cross-platform nature, better conversion, user-friendliness, and many other benefits.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are similar to PWA. Fundamentally, they are HTML pages designed to be super lightweight and really fast loading. They are designed to display only the most essential information such as texts and images. This technology is a workable solution for news platforms, blogs, and those small businesses that want to cut down costs on UI/UX development, connecting with their users at any Internet connection speed.

Technology Stack and Approaches for Web Application Development

The security, performance, and relevance of any web application largely depend on its tech stack. Here is the list of technologies and development approaches that will be widely used for building web solutions in 2023.

API-first Development

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have long been used to simplify the development process and enhance work between services in desktop, mobile, and web applications. Though, the API-first development trend has appeared recently. Before software developers created the product first and then considered how to establish API connections between services and devices. Since then, software developers have reconsidered their software-building methods and techniques and started thinking about how to deliver practical value to customers more than product perfection.

Today, the user-centered development approach allows businesses to roll out web solutions that would closely meet their customer demands. It becomes possible due to the wide implementation of various APIs. Apart from focusing on customers, APIs also help simplify the development process, making it less risky and error-prone, more consistent, and better adjustable to quickly changing customer and business requirements.

Micro Frontends

Microservice Architecture has been a software development trend for the back end for quite some time already. It didn’t take too long for this development approach to shift to the front-end layer. Now, when creating web applications, front-end developers prefer breaking up the front end into small manageable pieces that can be quickly composed together into flexible, simple-to-test, and implement user interfaces.

With Micro Frontends, web developers can create web solutions much faster due to smaller codebases which are much simpler to manage in comparison to monoliths. Moreover, they can reuse certain blocks across the built solution or slightly modify them and utilize them in other applications. This also makes Microservice development much cheaper and less error-prone.

Serverless Architecture

Due to the fast development of cloud computing opportunities, it has become much easier to host various applications on the cloud. But, what does it mean for web application owners? Third-party hosting on such clouds as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others removes the need to configure and support the application environment to ensure that it runs smoothly and without downtime.

Some other benefits of web application deployment to the cloud include no system overloading and quick scalability, no data loss and fast backups, a decrease in development costs, sustainable application development, and many others.

According to Markets and Markets, the global serverless architecture market size will increase from $7.6 bn in 2020 to $21.1 bn by 2025. This rapid increase is explained by a growing number of IoT apps and digital solutions that require complex backend support.

JavaScript Frameworks

JavaScript is the core programming language used for building each and every web solution. This programming language has been keeping its leading position in software development for 10 years already and it’s highly likely that web developers will continue to use it as a primary tool for front-end web development in 2023. Therefore, it’s important to know which JavaScript frameworks to select for building an effective and robust web application.

The major Java-Script web development frameworks that will continue to be popular in 2023 include:

• Vue.js – a lightweight JavaScript framework with an MVVM architecture that turns the creation of UI and SPAs into an easy and enjoyable journey. The framework is widely popular for its simplicity, reusability of elements, high performance, and speed due to the virtual DOM.
• Angular – a Google-supported JavaScript framework used for building dynamic pages and SPA web solutions. Angular suits well for developing complex dynamic web pages and is widely used in big projects. The main Angular advantages include MVC architecture, two-way data binding, dependency injection, own CLI, mobile friendliness, and many others.
• React.js – a super-popular JavaScript library for its intuitiveness, simplicity, and ease of learning in comparison to Angular. Although React can’t go toe-to-toe with Angular when it comes to building complex web front-ends, it’s highly effective for building UIs for web applications. React provides reusable components, it’s SEO-friendly, offers proficient one-day data binding, and much more.
• Node.js – a back-end JavaScript cross-platform development framework used for building traditional web solutions and back-end API services. Many software developers prefer using Node.js for its non-blocking I/O and asynchronous request handling. These features allow for building fast-performing web applications as well as microservices architecture solutions.

WebAssembly

Performance is one of the major aspects that determines the success of any web application. Therefore, more and more web application developers start implementing WebAssembly along with JavaScript in their web solutions.

WebAssembly is a powerful JavaScript assistant that can run in a browser together with JavaScript and execute complex code much faster. Software developers can write any critical operation parts of code in any programming language and WebAssembly will execute it right in a browser.

As a result, WebAssembly helps effectively resolve any performance problems that can happen during JavaScript complex computations. Main WebAssembly benefits include the ability to run on any web browser, support of any programming languages, implementation for serverless computing, and speed.

Automation Testing

As the web application codebase and its complexity grows, its testing turns into a challenging activity. That’s because quality assurance specialists have to re-test the existing features to ensure their smooth work and create more tests for the constantly added new ones. At some point, it becomes clear that routine testing of long-existing functionalities can be automated.

Testing automation helps companies to stay assured of their application’s high quality while keeping their software development teams small. Moreover, based on the accumulated test cases, software development teams can work out more effective testing strategies, improve their testing activities, and eventually deliver the best quality products.

Conclusion

Knowing the latest web application development trends allows companies to build relevant and powerful solutions that are engaging for the customers and lucrative for their businesses. Therefore, companies continuously audit the tools and solutions they implement when developing their software.

If you’re considering building a web solution to enhance your business development in 2023 then it’s high time to revise all the existing web development tools and technologies to create a performant and prominent application. Meanwhile, effective software should be developed by an effective software development team and if you’re looking for one, then we’re ready to provide you with the best software development specialists in the web development sphere.