Websites for 2020 – What can we expect to be trending?

What Will We Be Seeing in 2020?

• Load Speed – be under no illusion just how much of an impact speed has when it comes to search engine ranking. The load time of a page is a major factor that can affect the ranking of a site. Pages that take more than five seconds to load are likely to be given less priority by search engines which can have a major impact on potential customers making it to your site in the first place. You don’t have to be an IT expert to understand that the faster your site, the better the search position. From the customer perspective, research shows that 50% of users expect a site to load in two seconds or less when they click on it. Anything longer than that and they’ll leave and likely shop elsewhere. Worst case scenario, your potential buyer may not even make it to your site if it’s not ranked due to its slowness.
• Mobile First Design – being mobile friendly isn’t enough anymore. Your website should be designed and built ‘being mobile’ as a priority. Since the beginning of 2017 mobile traffic has accounted for nearly half of all web traffic worldwide. However more recently, Google’s search spider is now ‘mobile’, this means that all websites are ranked due to their mobile friendliness as default. Whilst the User Experience(UX) is paramount, this search spider means it’s  vital that your site is mobile friendly to make sure you don’t miss the mark.
• Chatbots – Artificial Intelligence will continue to play an ongoing role when it comes to customer service requests in the form of a chatbot. As machine learning gets ever more sophisticated, the chatbot is likely to become the norm on a website, helping customers navigate questions that arise while they browse for products and services. Having a chatbot provides another layer of customer service and helps to deal with potential queries keeping people on your website longer.
• SSL Certificates – no longer just a ‘trendy’ addition to have on your website, an SSL certificate installed on your webserver authenticates the identity of the website. In this world of cybercrime and hacked websites this means your visitors know for certain that they’re perusing and entering personal data within a safe and secure environment. Google applies a ranking boost for all SSL enable websites so whether your site is e-commerce based or not, if ensure that the very first update you make in 2020 is one that enables your customers to purchase from you with confidence.

Here at Webster Digital, we believe that each website that we create must be totally original. There are thousands of website templates out there but that’s not what we’re about. Fundamentally, we think that your company is better than a template and has its own story to tell – it is our job to meet your company, to spend time with you to extract this tale and then to represent it in a professional and functional way, so as to attract more customers and increase sales. Get in touch today.