WordPress continues to play a dominant role because the world’s hottest content material administration system (CMS), and as its use circumstances develop, it’s additionally discovering new enchantment with bigger organizations trying to cut back on net prices and do extra with much less.

That’s as a result of WordPress’s open supply, which implies there are not any upfront licensing charges for utilizing its core software program, and it’s backed by an enormous group of world contributors who preserve bugs and safety vulnerabilities at bay.

WordPress can be famed for its flexibility and its ease of integrating with different platforms, making it a major candidate as companies look to exchange pricey and cumbersome content material administration programs with open source content agility.

7 WordPress Development Trends to Follow Right Now

WordPress certainly leads the pack right here, each as a standalone content material framework in addition to a headless CMS, wherein WordPress is linked to a contemporary front-end framework like Vue.js or React.

As companies search for new methods to construct websites and leverage WordPress for their tasks, the next growth tendencies will assist them to unlock higher flexibility, create lovely designs, and obtain higher efficiency throughout the websites they create.

Prepared to leap in? Right here’s what we’ll cowl:

Block-Based mostly Modifying: From Gutenberg to Full Web site Modifying 

With the introduction of the block editor (Gutenberg) in 2018, WordPress signalled a brand new path for website builders, who till then had relied on the classic editor expertise for the majority of their WordPress submission and web page wants.

Whereas the traditional editor had an unimaginable run, the brand new block editor was a major evolution for WordPress, increasing on its low-code/no-code method to content material creation with pre-formatted blocks of code that allow a drag-and-drop submit and page-building expertise.

Within the few brief years because it launched, the block editor has given rise to nearly one hundred (and counting) reusable content material blocks in WordPress core, to not point out a protracted listing of custom blocks, which will be constructed for business consumption and particular person use.

However Gutenberg was solely the start relating to block-based enhancing in WordPress. With the rise of Full Site Editing, which started to appear in 2020 (in Alpha), block-based performance has expanded past the editor to embody the whole or “full” website enhancing expertise.

Latest variations of WordPress (5.9+) now embrace the flexibility to develop block-based management throughout an internet site’s theme and design structure, offering builders with an intuitive, environment-friendly solution to customise website components—from headers and typography to columns and imagery.

Full Web site Modifying additionally permits customers to make sitewide modifications with out having to navigate to particular person pages, providing anybody tasked with creating and managing many websites the flexibility to make sweeping edits with only a few easy clicks.

Although Full Web site Modifying is simply appropriate with block-based themes (which implies you’ll possible need to discover a new theme to take full benefit of), it represents a brand new chapter for WordPress and an rising technique of alternative for website house owners and builders to implement their digital imaginative and prescient at scale.

As they proceed to advance, Full Web site Modifying and block-based performance will symbolize much less of a ”development,” and extra of the long run solution to construct web sites utilizing WordPress.

Headless WordPress: Bringing Content material Creators and Builders Collectively 

Whereas builders and content material creators are discovering new benefits with the evolving editor expertise in WordPress, they’re additionally methods to attach that most well-liked technique of content material creation and administration with their fashionable front-end frameworks of alternative.

Enter headlessly, and particularly, headless WordPress architectures like Technicalworld, which brings collectively the very best of WordPress and fashionable front-end frameworks like Vue.js and React.

WP Engine has been investing in the way forward for headless WordPress by Atlas, and for good purpose. The need for headless options is predicted to proceed its rise—particularly for eCommerce and enormous enterprise websites—and almost $1.6 billion was invested in headless innovation by main firms between 2020 and 2021.

At its core, headless decouples the entrance and back-end structure of an internet site, permitting customers with completely different roles to depend on the instruments they love most with out disrupting different workflows.

In terms of headless WordPress, this implies content material creators and entrepreneurs who depend on WordPress for their day-to-day efforts proceed to make use of it as they see match, whereas builders tasked with constructing and sustaining front-end environments can accomplish that by utilizing their alternative of recent JavaScript frameworks.

Headless WordPress websites additionally supply huge safety enhancements for large-scale websites. With front-end and back-end parts working independently on separate servers, it turns into harder for unhealthy actors to hack websites by brute force or DDoS attacks. 

WP Engine has assembled a rising archive of headless WordPress developer sources, which you’ll find here.

You may as well begin experimenting with headless utilizing WP Engine Atlas totally free! Simply join a Sandbox Account and discover the complete characteristic set of Atlas in a risk-free, dev playground setting.

WordPress as an eCommerce Engine 

eCommerce is hardly a development—promoting and buying on-line is clearly here to stay, and there are quite a few accessible options for powering eCommerce shops, from all-in-one platforms to particular person integrations, and all the pieces in between.

The function of WordPress as an eCommerce engine, nonetheless, is a rising development, particularly as companies search to capitalize on its streamlined content material capabilities and vast flexibility for personalisation and eCommerce integrations.

WooCommerce, which is the most well-liked solution to construct eCommerce websites on WordPress, is constantly rated among the many prime eCommerce options on this planet, and it’s at the moment the most-utilized platform by global market share.

That’s no coincidence. A rising variety of companies are realizing the advantages of utilizing WordPress for their digital shops as a result it supplies a superb canvas for constructing or reimagining their eCommerce presence around a wealthy consumer expertise.

WooCommerce, which integrates seamlessly with WordPress websites, takes care of the commerce elements and permits website house owners to create a web-based retailer, add merchandise, subscriptions, safe funds, transport choices, and extra.

WooCommerce can be scalable, and it could possibly combine with a large listing of providers. Constructed with a REST API,  builders can design a posh retailer from scratch, lengthen a retailer for his or her shoppers, or add new merchandise to a WordPress website.

As builders look to make use of WooCommerce for their eCommerce websites, there are additionally choices for pairing these websites with additional features and integrations that amplify essential components like search and web page load velocity.

At WP Engine, we’ve honed our eCommerce hosting to do exactly that, with high-performance hosting, proprietary caching for WooCommerce, and Instant Store Search that delivers extra related search outcomes as much as 10 instances quicker.

Recent optimizations to our proprietary cache, EverCache, have resulted in further enhancements to web page load instances, with content material loading as much as two instances quicker when utilizing EverCache.

Need to discover extra about establishing or optimizing a WooCommerce retailer? Take a look at the on-demand periods under or click on right here for extra data on migrating your current WooCommerce retailer to WP Engine’s eCommerce platform in minutes.

Standardizing on WordPress 

One other macro development that‘s tied to bigger organizations pivoting away from legacy CMS options is a newfound appreciation for WordPress as a standardization instrument for a enterprise’ sprawling digital properties. you should read all articles in technicalword wordpress sections

For enterprise organizations like B&G Foods, shifting greater than 50 of its disparate model web sites below the umbrella of a WordPress Multisite network helped streamline inner groups’  content material manufacturing and alignment whereas rushing up time to market.

For different giant companies, standardizing websites on WordPress reduces overhead prices, mitigates safety dangers, hurries up time-to-market, and achieves model consistency. All whereas lowering the variety of suppliers required to efficiently construct a strong digital presence.

For builders at these organizations, standardizing the know-how they use might help streamline workflows and simplify coaching for future workers without stifling creativity. Plus, standardization throughout platforms can even ease safety complications, assist enhance the omnichannel expertise, and higher reinforce a model message at each touchpoint.

As extra organizations look to consolidate efforts and do extra with much less, regulate WordPress because the CMS of alternative for standardizing current digital content material on a single, unified system. one more thing to do. Do not forget to download avant browser technicalword for safe browsering.

VR/AR integrations Achieve Steam

It typically feels just like the “rise of VR/AR” has been rising for years now, which might be as a result of, nicely, it has (Google Glass premiered its prototype in 2013).

Whereas Digital and Augmented Actuality have made spectacular strides over the previous decade, we nonetheless have but to reach at widespread adoption. That mentioned, VR/AR know-how is slowly trickling outward and discovering its approach right into a growing number of integrations for WordPress.

High-quality VR/AR integrations assist bridge the hole between what customers see online and what they expertise in actual life. Product shows, coaching programs, and different instructional content material utilizing VR and AR are extra immersive and permit customers to create a stronger reference to the product or subject in query.

For WordPress website builders, which may appear to be brushing up on the abilities required to create a 3D map or combine these immersive VR/AR-compatible experiences with an current WordPress website. If these integrations will not be doable, it’d require re-theming utilizing a VR/AR-specific WordPress theme.

Participating customers by VR and AR can profit extra than simply retailers who need to put a highlight on their merchandise, nonetheless. From tourism and gaming to structure, automotive care, and healthcare, VR and AR have gotten the usual for a way customers attain high quality training on a subject.

Need to discover out extra? Take a look at this episode of Torque’s Social Hour, which takes a better take a look at 3OV, a 3D WordPress plugin that turns your website right into a VR/AR expertise:

Design Should-Haves: Minimalist and Cellular Pleasant 

Whereas most of the above tendencies contact on website design, it actually is a constantly-evolving ecosystem in its personal proper, particularly as new performance and capabilities change into accessible and rising tendencies take maintain.

Put merely, Design Matters, and as website builders create their subsequent digital tasks utilizing WordPress, there are a number of no-brainers in addition to some new developments that could be of curiosity.

Cellular-friendly designs, for instance, are not a mere profit and have changed into vital. More than 60% of the web’s global traffic now comes from mobile searches, so a clunky show or poor consumer interface has the potential to alienate greater than half of your viewers.

In step with more recent tendencies, minimalist and “neo-brutalist” designs are a more and more common approach to make sure website content material appears nice on a smaller display while preserving guests engaged for longer intervals and giving them extra time to work together together with your model and merchandise.

Different tendencies to look out for embrace new methods of utilizing scrolling and telling tales with visuals—experimental areas the place issues like Full Web site Modifying can and can play a bigger function.

The Ongoing Push for Efficiency 

Whereas the above is a mixture of rising tendencies and increasingly-familiar ideas, we’ll shut the listing out with one development that by no means goes away: website efficiency and the necessity to commonly optimize your website to make sure you’re maintaining trade requirements (to not point out your rivals).

Whereas this is applicable to all websites, it’s clearly prime of thoughts for contributors to WordPress core, who proceed to roll out updates and enhancements to key options that immediately have an effect on website efficiency.

For example, WordPress recently added native help for WebP, a contemporary picture format that gives lossless and lossy compression for pictures on the internet. This supplies a superb choice for displaying high-quality pictures online utilizing a small picture format (so efficiency isn’t sacrificed).

Extra just lately, the discharge of WordPress 6.0 included quite a few further performance-focused enhancements, protecting a variety of efficiency areas reminiscent of bettering the web page and post-load velocity, lowering the execution time of varied question varieties, caching, navigation menus, and far more. Discover extra about WordPress 6.0 here.