Over 5 billion people (63.1% of the global population) accessed the internet regularly via smart devices in 2022 – and this number is expected to continue to grow each year. This torrent of daily users creates the need for better UX delivered first and foremost by the front end.
Keeping an eye on the latest frontend trends in 2023 can be a frantic endeavour. But for developers who make it their mission to continuously make an impact in the industry, staying on top of the latest programming languages, frameworks, and technologies is essential to remain competitive in this industry.
As the frontend is the first point of user engagement, it needs to be exciting, beautiful, and always working efficiently to grab users’ attention and, most importantly, keep them engaged.
How to do this using the latest the frontend space has to offer? Look no further. Here is our list of the most important and future-focused frontend trends for 2023.
Headless CMS
Although headless content management systems (CMS) or “headless architecture” is predominantly a backend function, its effects on the frontend are enough to warrant importance for any serious frontend developer looking to level up in 2023. Headless CMS stores business logic as APIs and is able to push content to the frontend according to device/application. This means that you don’t have to design the frontend for each device allowing you to work quicker and smarter, not harder.
Technologies
Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to dazzle and amaze us as the technology evolves, and the frontend space is no different. AI simplifies the most crucial steps in website and app development: it can handle the build, coding with self-learning algorithms, automated testing, and QA tasks, leaving more time for developers to focus on more high-end tasks. We predict more websites and apps being built using AI technologies.
With AI’s evolving learning and predictive capabilities, we expect to see continued drives towards improving the customisation of user experiences through recommendations, suggestions, and relevant search engine results to improve the UX and customer journey. Despite this not being an altogether ‘new’ trend, we see the continuous improvements of AI’s capabilities for websites and mobile apps habitually making an impact in the future.
Single-page websites are becoming popular for sites that don’t have much data-heavy content, like blogs or portfolios, for a number of reasons. Firstly, they load much faster and require less bandwidth, meaning they are great for locations and devices with limited internet access. Secondly, they are simple to maintain when updating as far less coding and hassle are required when working with less content. Single-page websites are great for usability: they require less scrolling and are designed to present content quickly so users can enjoy what is presented far easier.
AI-powered chatbots are the industry’s best answer to ensuring great customer experiences. They establish a business’ ‘humanness’ by performing important customer care endeavours 24/7, providing a proverbial ‘voice on the other end of the line’ so customers feel their needs are being met in real-time. They are intelligent and helpful tools used to provide value to customers which establish a deep relationship between customer and brand. We see more businesses adopting chatbots on their platforms in the coming years.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) saw a steady rise in adoption this year as businesses attempted to tap into the growing trend of mobile usage. The number of global mobile phone users is expected to reach 6.8 billion in 2023, so developers are using PWAs to meet the demands of modern consumers using their mobiles to browse and shop. Faster load times, streamlined design and functionality, and the ability to operate with little to no internet connection, makes PWAs a trend to look out for in 2023.
Architecture
JAMstack is poised to make a big impact in 2023 riding off another successful year in frontend circles. It’s a web-development infrastructure that combines client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup that helps developers work faster, easier, and cheaper. JAMstack websites cram HTML into prebuilt content delivery networks (CDN) with dynamic components based on APIs, creating a faster user experience.
Micro frontends is a popular trend enveloping the industry recently, making it one of the most widely-used “buzzwords” in developer gatherings (aka nerd herds). Micro frontends is a relatively new architectural style where independent frontend applications are built and later added into the whole codebase. It is a way to be able to dissect and work on individual components of traditional monolithic frontend codebases.
Breaking your frontend into smaller, independent components allows for seamless integration for different teams to work on different aspects of your app – they can develop, build, test, and deploy independently of each other while working towards the same goal. We expect to see more adoption of this new frontend architecture in 2022 and beyond.
Frameworks
ReactJS is the dominant framework and library for JavaScript, making it the most popular framework used by developers around the globe. ReactJS is preferred for not only its speed and simplicity but also for its power to create rich and engaging web apps with minimal coding. This framework ensures better performance thanks to its ability to prevent updates from DOM, resulting in faster, smoother rendering of applications, and boosting better user experience. These are just a few of the reasons why we see ReactJS continuing to make waves in 2022 and it did this year.
AngularJS is the direct competition to ReactJS in terms of popularity, and for good reason. The framework is notoriously easy to use as it requires menial coding which saves a tremendous amount of time to focus on the important details. Its Model View Controller (MVC) architecture is a highlight which allows you to string or attach application code together which, again, saves valuable time. In addition, AngularJS’s suite of features, including two-way data binding, incredible community support thanks to its Google ties, and coding modularity makes it a firm contender to take the top framework spot in 2022.
As a surprising recent competitor to framework heavyweights ReactJS and AngularJS, VueJS gained popularity this year thanks to a relatively easy learning curve, meaning developers with minimal experience can master the framework faster than most on the market. VueJS is a progressive framework for JavaScript with its core focus centred around making UI development simple and fast. With easy HTML integration, declarative rendering support, and real-time development observation, it is easy to see why VueJS is poised to challenge ReactJS and AngularJS’s framework dominance in 2022.
Programming languages
Unsurprisingly, JavaScript is set to continue its domination in the programming languages sphere in both popularity and usage in 2023. Offering the largest range of libraries and frameworks, developers spanning the full spectrum of experience are able to find precisely what they require to build beautiful applications and websites.
To strengthen its lead in popularity over other programming languages such as CSS and HTML, JavaScript’s already immense list of features has been boosted by the latest JavaScript ECMAScript 2021 features and updates (including numeric separators, string replaceALL, logical assignment operator, and more) which we will see more developers utilising in 2022.
In the world of HTML (markup language), Schema Markup is going to be an ace up any developer’s sleeve when trying to rank high on searchers. The coding tool provides standardised microdata that you add to the HTML of a page that describes the content in a language that all search engines are able to fully understand. Google’s crawler can easily read the tags and generate specific search results that boost your SEO.
Design
Motion design made a splash in 2022 and is still set to be the next ‘big thing’ in the UI space in 2023. It provides beautifully appealing customer experiences and brings your website or app to life in unique ways. It also assists in helping users intuitively use and navigate your platform by guiding a user’s eye to relevant information and content in ways that captivate and engage. The best user interfaces are designed with the user experience as the core focus and motion design is a great way to please and entertain your users while providing them with added value on how to use your site.
Summary
There you have it, our list of the most notable frontend trends for 2023. While some of the items on our list were featured in last year’s list, it goes to show two important things: 1) that the technologies and trends continue to evolve and impact the industry, and 2) we didn’t miss with our predictions 🙂
Want to stay in front of your frontend?
If you are looking to implement the latest programming languages, frameworks, and technologies, architecture, and UI design into your digital platforms, get in touch with us today.
