Gutenberg Enhancements
Gutenberg is following a four-phase roadmap that will touch major pieces of WordPress. WordPress is always evolving and currently work is specifically underway on the second phase of the Gutenberg project. The goal of this project is to provide a greater web presence for people wanting to start businesses, which WordPress has been doing since Phase 1 where they released their new block editor. Phase 2 of Gutenberg won’t be finished when it’s merged into WordPress. The work to gather feedback and iterate based on user needs will continue after WordPress 5.8 is released.
Gutenberg development will also shorten the learning curve for WordPress beginners.
“I think the main WordPress trend you’ll see in the near future is full site block editing. Using the Gutenberg editor, you’re already able to use blocks to easily redesign pages and posts. However, that functionality is going to be rolled out soon to all aspects of entire sites. This will cut down tremendously on the WordPress learning curve for newbies. However, the challenge here will be achieving optimal site speed while using these full site block editors, as they tend to slow sites down, which Google doesn’t like,” says Scott Winstead, founder of My Elearning World.
WordPress Performance Improvements
WordPress has a new Performance Team that is made up of contributors from Google and Yoast. Their goal is to help improve WordPress performance across various plugins and themes. This team identified 19 areas of focus, including images, JavaScript, CSS, web fonts, Bootstrap, and more. They then narrowed it down to four focus areas and created working groups for each during their kickoff meeting on November 2021.
As a result, we can expect advancements, new features, updates, and more in the following areas:
- Images: Serving images in good quality but as small as possible
- JavaScript: Optimizing JavaScript orchestration
- Site Health: Providing the user with data to understand performance
- Measurement: Compiling data and analysis, and reporting on performance
Automatic Updates for WordPress
WordPress introduced automated theme and plugin updates over the last few years. While Greenlight Web generally recommends disabling this feature, we support automatic updates for some of our smaller client sites. With all the custom code and so many third-party plugins, maintenance can become time-consuming. Occasionally customisations can stop working until certain plugins are updated.
WooCommerce Growth
In 2022 we can expect to see a continued increase in the number of WooCommerce sites created.
During his keynote at the State of the Word 2020, Matt Mullenweg stressed that e-commerce was a big part in helping to grow WordPress. WooCommerce has helped increase business revenue at an unprecedented rate. In fact, Mullenweg said that by December 2020, WooCommerce had facilitated over $20 billion in sales, over double that of last year.
Mobile-first websites
Don’t ignore the importance of mobile-first websites in 2022. In 2021, the number of mobile internet users in the UK reached 62.3 million, a figure which is projected to increase by approximately 2.86 million and amount to over 65 million by 2026.
With the increased use of smartphones and tablets, it is important for website developers and business owners to consider creating responsive WordPress Themed sites that adjust to the size of the device’s screen. A responsive site will give your business a competitive edge and enable you to reach a wider audience.
Use of white space and minimalism
One of the major web design trends is using space effectively and making everything minimalistic.
One of the reasons a lot of people choose a white space theme is for its clean & pleasing heavy margins. It also makes it easy to draw focus towards your focal areas while still maintaining a clean website. We expect this WordPress theme trend will continue to dominate in 2022.
AI Content development
Not just a WordPress Trend, but one of the top trends for 2021 was AI content development. Suddenly there are a lot of AI platforms to help Digital Marketers create or improve the content on their sites. Some are really good while others still need a bit more refinement.
10 popular AI content-generating platforms:
If you are looking to upgrade your WordPress website to be mobile-friendly, look better and load faster, get in touch today. We will be happy to discuss what we can do for your business.
