With over 75 million of websites under its hood and over 55 percent CMS market share, WordPress continues to become the leading content management system on the web this year. The previous year has been great for WordPress users. In 2016, there were 26 successful official WordPress releases and also introduced several astonishing WordPress web trends, such as one-page themes, hamburger menus, etc to give a seamless experience to their end users.
WordPress is getting better and better with every passing year and we still expecting a lot more to come from WordPress in 2017 in terms of new features, improvements, updates and other built-in capabilities. In fact, the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, released his word of speech to give you a glimpse of what we will explore new in WordPress this year.
Matt has clearly stated that the WordPress community is expected to work on the areas where you will get seamless user experience and also bring improvements in core WordPress. There are many other predictions about WordPress that are likely to luster in 2017.
Let’s take a glimpse of WordPress predictions that are expected to outshine in 2017:
Mobile-first WordPress themes will continue to dominate
In 2016, mobile usage has first time surpassed the desktop usage when it comes to accessing or browsing the internet. According to the statistics, mobile devices now holds 51.26 percent of market share while the desktop versions reduced to 48.74 percent. This clearly shows that there is a drastic change in the consumer’s behavior while using mobile devices to access the internet.
Since the percentage of mobile usage is constantly increasing, experts believe that the mobile-first WordPress themes will continue to dominate the web industry in 2017. With the help of mobile-first themes, website owners will be able to give their mobile visitors a rich and hassle-free user experience, which in turn boost their conversions and increase their ROI.
The best part is that Google prefers mobile-first websites over non-responsive websites when it comes to determining the SEO ranking. So, we can say that this particular trend will stay here for longer.
More focus on Encryptions and HTTPS
Since its inception, security has always been a major concern for WordPress users. But this year, we are expecting to see more safe and secure WordPress sites. The platform has strictly impelled their users to use HTTPS to strengthen the security of WordPress sites.
On the other side, Google stated that it will consider those sites that are using HTTPS and proper encryptions while optimizing their search engine rankings. It clearly means that HTTPS and encryptions will become compulsory for all websites in 2017.
Multipurpose WordPress themes are on the surge
Most of the websites owners have integrated multipurpose WordPress themes to save both their time and efforts while designing their sites. This particular trend is believed to surge in 2017 as well.
A multipurpose theme will help you create a beautiful, user-centric, and unique web design on the fly. If we compare to conventional themes and templates used in a specific niche, we can say that these themes offer tons of diversified features to help you build anything, without even writing a single piece of coding.
Although the features may vary from one theme to the other, they can go with all websites, industries and content types to make your job easier. Plus, you will get a ton of customization to let you enhance the overall look and feel of your site according to your business.
Video headers
In 2016, we have seen some brilliant examples of video headers on different types of websites. In fact, video backgrounds have been gaining a lot of popularity among creative website owners. It can help you drive more web traffic towards your site. It is definitely an amazing alternative to image sliders.
So, we are expecting that this particular trend will outshine in WordPress itself in 2017. Use There are many video WordPress themes available on WordPress theme repository that will help you embed quality and engaging video backgrounds on your WordPress site on the fly.
In fact, professional WordPress theme developers are focusing on creating more Video headers themes to take the overall WordPress web design to the next level.
The Future of SaaS plugins
There is a good chance that WordPress developers will invest more of their time in developing SaaS plugins in 2017 to make them more secure and reliable. Although this trend is not new to the WordPress developers, still it will get more popular with every passing year.
In fact, existing standalone WordPress plugins are pushed to use Saas (Software as a Service) to fix the serious security threats and vulnerabilities.
WordPress will become more accessible
Setting up a WordPress blog or site becomes super easy because it is simple, intuitive and accessible. And Matt Mullenweg has already made it clear that WordPress will become more accessible in 2017.
As the platform enjoys more than 21 percent of market share across the world, it becomes quite obvious that the core community will work on making in more accessible and usable.
In 2016, there were around 116 wordcamps and more than 3100 meetups in over 53 countries that inspired the co-founder to make the platform more reachable. In fact, WordPress is already being translated into more and more languages and will continue to surge in 2017.
Integration of JS experts in the community
This year WordPress community is going to become more powerful. Earlier, the core community was ruled only PHP experts, but now it will also include the Javascript experts. This means you will get a more diverse and extensive community from now.
Endnote
Over the last few years, WordPress has grown into a more powerful, reliable, accessible, flexible, scalable, and customizable CMS platform. Since it keeps on improving its core features with every passing year, you will witness a more robust and feature-rich platform in 2017.
The WordPress trends stated above in this blog post are expected to propel in the coming years.
