10 Web Development Trends to Pay Attention to in 2019

What a time to be alive if you’re into web development! The year 2019 is bringing us an abundance of new and exciting web development trends to look into, so let’s do exactly that!

Here’s a list of the 10 most significant web development trends to pay attention to in 2019:

1. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) continuing to propagate

The idea behind PWAs is quite simple – “make a website that looks and behaves like an app – especially when viewed on a mobile device.”

With mobile web traffic surpassing the desktop web traffic a couple of years ago, companies continue to look for ways to optimize the experience for their mobile visitors. PWAs seem like the perfect answer since they allow the site owner to minimize the investment needed to build a functional app.

Lots of software web development companies will be able to provide you with PWA solutions to fit whatever your brand needs. Like YND, for instance.

2. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) becoming the standard

AMP is a concept introduced by Google in an effort to improve website performance on mobile devices. AMP pages appear to load almost instantly, thus significantly improving the experience that mobile visitors get.

Add to that; Google also seems to be favoring AMP-powered pages in the search results. Building an AMP version of your website makes a lot of sense.

3. JavaScript to continue dominating

With libraries such as Angular, Vue, and React gaining serious popularity last year, we can only expect things to continue in a similar direction in 2019 as well.

The appeal of such solutions is that they allow you to build dynamic and functional applications on the front-end without needing to code everything from scratch.

4. API-centered development rising

APIs have been making their mark on the web of today and for a very good reason.

Once you make your API public, you’re essentially making it possible for other developers to interact with your products and solutions, and thus growing awareness and the community around your company.

Not to mention that you’re making the core of your development platform-agnostic.

5. Even more focus on AI algorithms

“AI” is probably the word of the decade.

AI is expected to be a $3.9T industry sooner than later, and we already saw more than 70% of growth in business value in the AI space over the last 12 months.

It’s no surprise that AI is making its way into web development as well. With companies like Facebook and Google leading the way, we’re witnessing quite sophisticated uses of machine learning and decision making processes on the web.

6. Security becoming even more important

Speaking of Facebook, the previous year was chock-full of various security and privacy fiascos for them. However, security issues are not just the domain of Facebook but any company doing web development. It’s one of the key questions to address in 2019.

Figuring out how to make your products and the web overall safer in 2019 will be one of the main challenges to solve.

7. Blockchain development becoming more common

“Blockchain” is another viable candidate to take the crown as the word of the decade.

Even though the public’s perception of blockchain is mainly tied to Bitcoin, the technology itself goes way beyond and is now beginning to get used in web development as well.

The most significant benefit is the possibility of running decentralized web systems, databases, improving security and privacy.

Blockchain web development is perhaps one of our best bets to improve the level of privacy we can generally expect from web applications.

8. JAMstack making a mark

JAMstack is a relatively new concept. It stands for JavaScript, APIs, Markup. The idea is to make it possible for developers to rely on static website structures, while also having the ability to build dynamic elements.

Essentially, JAMstack is about getting all the benefits of dynamic sites while suffering from none of the drawbacks (mainly security-related).

How it all works? JavaScript is the client-facing layer that takes care of processing requests. APIs take care of all the server-side processing. Markup is how you generate the resulting static website.

9. Internet of Things (IoT) getting on the web

Statista has some very interesting data on the popularity of IoT and the number of connected devices worldwide. Basically, those numbers go up exponentially. In fact, it’s expected that they will reach 26 billion in 2019. Then more than 30 billion in 2020.

While IoT isn’t among the leading trends on the web just yet, we can only imagine that more and more web applications will start integrating IoT connectivity in various forms. With more smart devices in people’s hands every year, there’s no way companies won’t end up capitalizing on this.

10. Chatbots making a comeback

Customer support has always been one of the tougher aspects of any company’s web presence. The problem is that people expect support to come instantly – the second a problem arises. The difficult part is that a support representative might not always be available. A way to solve this? Chatbots.

That being said, this does go back to the topic of AI, since the goal isn’t to implement any ol’ chatbot, but rather an “intelligent” one that’s based on some form of AI.

Such a solution can guarantee 24/7 customer support, even if your actual support team is very small.

Anything else?

2019 is undoubtedly going to be an interesting year, and these web development trends are just part of the reason. Anything we missed? Feel free to share in the comments.