Future website trends and what to expect in 2021 and beyond

It has long been unnecessary to mention the likes of “mobile-responsiveness”, “security”, or “fast load times” in a list such as this. They have become such an integral part of website development that it’s no longer a trend, and is just par for the course.

Here are just some of the upcoming trends that we predict we will begin to see more and more over the next few years. Some will become as essential as responsiveness, and others will simply be phased out by the next big trend.

1. Abstraction

Getting a website to stand out amongst over a billion other websites is becoming more and more difficult. Therefore, we expect many websites will attempt to attract attention by being as eye catching as possible; using bright, vibrant colour combinations, large, bold text, and contrasting imagery.

We also expect to see an increase in abstract websites, where developers intentionally use bad design practises, most likely to the site’s detriment, in an attempt to differentiate them from all the rest. And while we admire the creativity that often leads to such a site, we have to recommend not being different just for the sake of it.

2. Comfort

Almost as a contradiction to trend 1 on this list, we will also likely see an increase in the number of sites that intend to keep their viewers around for much longer by making their site easy and comfortable to explore. Using calmer colour combinations, softer images, and easy to read text. These sites may be simple, or even boring to look at from a design point of view, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be effective, and a welcome break from the eye-straining boldness of other sites.

3. Dark mode

By no means is this a new trend; in fact, all screens were “light-on-dark” in the beginning, as it was easier and cheaper to only light up small areas of the screen. As developers, we have long been accustomed to using dark mode to reduce the eye-strain from looking at lines of code for many (many) hours of the day. This style has now started to spread out to rest of the world too, mostly through popular apps allowing users to toggle between light and dark modes, and will no doubt be adopted by a lot more websites too.

4. Whitespace

We believe that the use of whitespace is undervalued as a design technique. It provides balance, improves legibility, and can help guide the user in a particular direction, improving the overall success of a website. Just imagine how much more content a website like Google.com could display, but instead they opt for a clean, simple, and comprehensible interface. It’s not simply “less-is-more”, but purposeful design decisions to give website elements the space they require to be most effective.

5. Voice recognition

Although far from perfect, voice recognition has seen a dramatic increase in popularity. If a device has an internet connection, it will almost certainly also be capable of delivering some kind of speech recognition service. So, why not websites too? We see this being most prevalent on ecommerce sites, where the user can “search” for products quickly and easily, but really, there are no limitations to the kind of data that can be requested or delivered.

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Come back next week to read part 2!