Web designing is constantly evolving and each year new trends hit the market that set a new path for web designers for the entire year.
Following these trends is extremely important as it allows web designers to design engaging UX/UI for their websites to keep the users engaged. With 2023 only a few weeks away, it’s time to prepare yourself for the upcoming web design trends in 2023 and incorporate them into your web design practices to deliver user-centric websites.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the most popular web design trends that’ll shape the future of the web designing industry in 2023 and help you develop a visually engaging website.
So, without any further ado, let’s dive in.
1. Horizontal Scrolling
Do you remember the criticism horizontal scrolling received from users in the late 2000s? During that period, horizontal was considered to be a design mistake, however, it is now emerging as a popular design trend that’ll enhance the overall user experience.
While it will not entirely replace vertical scrolling, the main objective is to introduce horizontal scrolling to make a website more navigable for users. Of course, it also means that you can’t integrate horizontal scrolling into every website. The idea is to decide whether it will improve your website’s user experience.
Keep in mind that if you want to introduce horizontal scrolling on your website, it would be crucial to provide users with a clear visual indication so that they can utilize it effectively.
2. Web Page Loading Speed
Page speed will always remain a popular web design trend, considering Google considers it as one of the top ranking signals to crawl and rank websites.
If you want to dominate search engine rankings, it would be crucial that your website’s loading speed is top-notch. As per the general thumb rule, your web pages shall not take more than 3 seconds to load, regardless of the visual elements you’ve added to them.
Now, there are different ways to optimize the loading speed of a website. However, the general rules for page speed optimization include:
- Compress Images before uploading them
- Embed YouTube links instead of directly publishing a video to your website
- Optimize CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
- Use a Content Distribution Network
In case you’re not familiar with this technical jargon, you can also hire professional web designers and let them optimize your website’s loading speed to unlock better search engine visibility.
3. Simple Designs
Motion graphics are great and it’s no surprise that they make a website look more elegant. But, nothing comes closer to a simple aesthetic design when it comes to delivering a remarkable user experience.
These days, when the average attention span of a user has reduced to eight seconds, you can’t expect to engage new customers with a complicated web design. If your website is crowded with unnecessary motion graphics and doesn’t deliver a navigable user experience, it’ll fail to retain new visitors.
To avoid this scenario, make sure to incorporate a simple design scheme that does not ruin the user experience. You can also use ready-to-use themes offered by many CMS (Content Management Systems) and avoid falling victim to poor user retention rates.
Along with choosing a simple design scheme, you should also priortize navigation to ensure users can easily navigate through different web pages. Navigation becomes even more crucial when you’re designing a large-scale website (with 100s of web pages) as it’ll allow users to reach the desired web page within seconds.
4. Conveying Stories via Illustrations
Designers have been using stock images for several years. That’s about to change in the coming few years! The end-users do not want to see these stock pictures that look common and a bit robotic.
Instead, they prefer visuals that convey a story and give away product information more effectively.
One such design element is illustrations. It’s projected that illustrations – both black & white and colored – will become a common web design trend in the coming future. Designers will most likely have to incorporate them into their websites to add the required human touch and stand apart from the rest of the crowd.
Adding illustrations will also allow you to utilize your creativity to describe your product/services in a unique way. You can also incorporate 3D elements into your illustrations to make them more interactive. However, make sure that adding these 3D visuals should not compromise the page loading speed otherwise you’ll end up losing valuable traffic.
5. GIFs in Blogs
Ask a team of SEO experts and they’ll tell you the significance of publishing blogs on your website. Even in 2022, blogs are one of the most popular content formats to load your website with valuable content and acquire long-term customers. However, you can’t succeed by writing plain old simple blogs.
As we mentioned earlier, the attention span of an average user has reduced drastically. It means if you want to engage readers through your blogs, it would be crucial to make them interesting. In addition to focusing on the storyline, you’ll also need visual elements such as images and GIFs to keep the readers engaged.
Now, the latter is a relatively better approach to increase user engagement as they can make the content more interactive. Instead of conventional plain images, GIFs add more value to the entire storyline and encourage the readers to spend a longer duration on the page.
6. Voice Optimization
Voice optimization is already an ongoing web design practice that’s been a part of the industry for a few years now. However, in the next few years, voice search optimization will become more important as more and more consumers will use the voice search feature to find products and services online.
The advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is constantly improving the functionality and feedback of home & voice assistants like Google Home, Alexa, Siri, Cortana, etc. Consequently, customers are choosing the voice search feature to find everything on their smartphones.
Whether you own an ecommerce website or a regular service-based platform, publishing blogs with GIFs will improve the overall results of your content marketing practices.
Conclusion
Having a web presence is an effective way to lead the digital market. However, in this competitive market, if you want to gain the required exposure to your website, it’ll be crucial to follow the latest web design trends to build an engaging UI. If you need a team of expert designers, get in touch with Net Spark Solutions. We have a team of in-house designers with diverse technical expertise. We leverage best development practices to devise user-engaging websites that help businesses scale their brand and get ahead of the competition.
