As you can see from the title of this post, this would be a so-called “reflection post” on 2017’s trends most WordPress websites users were obsessed with.
Even though the year 2017 is not over yet, for most businesses the period Nov-Dec is a low season, but for most design-related blogs it’s another great opportunity to shoot few posts about website design or marketing trends.
Okay, so here they come, the brightest WordPress design trends of 2017.
Single-Page Websites
In the 2017’s chart, single page WordPress websites occupied position #1. The reasons are just as simple, as creating a one-page website.
Having so many one page WordPress themes available one can launch a single-page website in a few hours. These websites will save you time on their development and money on maintenance. As a rule owners of these websites don’t blog or use third-party platforms like Medium to publish their articles.
Drag-and-Drop Content Builders
In 2017 the range of content builders was extended with several names like Elementor, Beaver and Power. Even though they already existed in 2K16, this year they became extremely popular. But still not as popular as Visual Composer, this builder is still the most robust solution available for WordPress.
Color
In the chart of top 5 most important things of the website, color scheme occupies position #2, right after the template.
Color scheme is extremely important, it influences not only user’s emotions, but also makes them either love you, or hate.
Color influences emotions, thoughts and most important your website’s conversion rate. Here’s a great guide about top converting colors, I guess you need to print it and laminate.
As you may have heard Pantone has announced Greenery as 2017 color. This color was chosen as a symbol of new beginnings. Lots of website owners have followed Pantone’s lead and made their sites a little bit more greenish.
Here you can read more about Pantone’s green.
Another great thing in terms of color inspiration is Google’s Material Design. Even though they say that there are no wrong colors for some reasons they have chosen specific colors for their palette and stick to it. If I were you, I’d keep my eyes on material color palette and would pick some awesome colors for my website.
Even though Material Design as a trend was introduced in June 2014, more than three years already, oh God, it doesn’t seem to stop anytime soon.
Bold, Creative Typography
Website designed became obsessed with typographic experiments somewhere at the end of 2015, last year their passion has grown and gained powers, now in 2017 we can see abundance of website with such exquisite typography combinations that it’s hard to take your eyes off anyways.
Most important thing, most web designers and developers use Google Fonts, and there’s a huge collection of fonts for any taste and purpose. The most important question here would be: “How to combine fonts anyway?”. There is a great place called fonts.greatsimple.io so you can get some inspiration there, and use it if you want to perform successful typographic experiments.
Videos! Videos Everywhere!
This year embedded videos have become a lot more important than they were last year. In 2017 you might have seen videos everywhere, on website intros, blog posts, about pages, team pages, used as product presentations or as background for a whole page.
What you don’t know is that video will keep on rocking the webs, according to Hubspot’s stats. Next year video traffic will be 80% of Internet traffic. Video streaming became extremely popular with services like Periscope or Meerkat. In most cases video is much better than a piece of 1000-words content, video can transfer your emotions directly “into the head” of your visitor.
As for me the best possible way to use a video on some website is to have a video background, no matter what’s in the video it will look really awesome.
Speed
Need for WordPress Speed was another obsession of most WordPress website owners, here’s a nice guide if you haven’t worked on the speed of your WordPress website yet.
There you will find lots of tips and tricks that will help you speed up your website without sacrificing it’s looks or UX.
Encryption
Google made the whole Internet a safe place, is your website doesn’t have a Secure mark in the address bar, than your rankings are doomed.
Going secure is pretty easy all you need is an SSL certificate from a trustworthy provider, another thing is the cost of this certificate. For example, digicert.com sells certificates starting from $175/year.
Having a certificate is extremely important for eCommerce websites, if your visitors will see a Secure mark they are more likely to become your clients.
Over to You
2018 is coming, don’t forget to prepare you website for a bunch of new trends with best WordPress plugins. You can start from a highly optimized WordPress theme, that already has on board all the things mentioned above.