This is the second in our three part series looking at what the year ahead has in store for the world of WordPress. As we mentioned last week, the coming is looking pretty exciting for the WordPress ecosystem. Here are some more trends to keep a look out for in 2020.
Hello, Bonjour, Guten Tag, Hola!
An amazing fact of the modern internet economy is that your eCommerce store gives you access to a global market of customers. The world is becoming a smaller place, and the ability to communicate effectively with customers of every culture and creed allows you to leverage and scale your business in unprecedented ways.
In 2020 we predict that WordPress developments that are able to cater to users and customers in their own language will become hugely popular.
Whilst WordPress doesn’t offer out-of-the-box bilingual or multilingual sites, it does do the next best thing. Polylang, Weglot and TranslatePress are a pretty good collection of plugins that let you translate WordPress sites into many different languages. We are fans of the WordPress Multilingual Plugin in particular, which integrates with WooCommerce, and allows your site to interact with users from over 100 countries.
WordPress chatty Bots
Chatbots are more popular than ever before, and have become pretty much common place for many different sites and eCommerce stores. They are a great way to automate interactions with your website visitors, and as the technical sophistication behind them increases, users are getting a much richer experience.
Chatbots usually converse with users via a chat window placed on the website, or can be integrated into other messaging systems like Facebook Messenger.
They are mostly run using a predetermined set of rules so that they can either collect information from users or point them in the right direction to certain products or offers. But, the advent of AI has spawned a new type of Chatbot that is flexible enough to respond to specific user questions.
In the age of instant gratification, we think that having a website chatbot to handle and shape user interactions will be a real game changer.
WordPress motion
We mentioned in last week’s post that websites need to be quicker than ever for the battle to keep a users’ attention. Statistics from Crazyegg say that at most you have 15 seconds to get hold of a user’s attention before they’re liable to leave.
A trend that we’ve seen flourish in the wake of flighty users, is the use of motion and animation being utilised in website design to grab their attention. Animate It! is great for adding animations to content on posts widgets and pages when visitors interact with elements on your site. The trick though is to strike the right balance between getting their attention, and being useful!
Look out for next week’s final instalment as we wrap up our WordPress trends in 2020 series.