WordPress as a Service: 7 WordPress Web Development Trends for 2023

WordPress is a versatile service platform offering a huge variety of functions. They can facilitate any individual and business website needs. Over the 19+ years of its existence, it has completely transformed from a simple blogging platform to the most powerful content management system (CMS). In fact, 43% of all websites use it.

With an impressive library of features, plugins, and third-party service integrations, WordPress offers unique digital experiences for their customers. It enables organizations to scale and grow, and reach for the stars.

However, what we love most about WordPress is that it is constantly evolving and becoming even better!

In this article, we will go over the top 7 web development trends that will continue to transform, improve, and revolutionize WordPress in new and exciting ways in 2023. Read on to see what the future holds for our favorite CMS!

7 WordPress Web Development Trends for 2023

1. More Gutenberg Enhancements.
2. Larger Enterprises Are Shifting to WordPress.
3. The Growing Popularity of Headless WordPress.
4. The Expansion of WooCommerce.
5. The Growing Popularity of Drag-and-Drop Page Builders.
6. Voice Search Optimization.
7. Much Better Performance and Accessibility.

1. More Gutenberg Enhancements

The Gutenberg Project follows a four-phase roadmap that reimagines how content is created on the web. The goal is to provide the audience with easily accessible out-of-the-box tools for building a web presence from scratch.

We can already see the changes in the first two phases – easier editing, and full-site customization. Furthermore, the WordPress 6.1 update introduced additional improvements in block editing, creating custom templates, and accessibility.

The next two phases – collaboration, and multilingual support, will make content management even easier for website owners. We expect to see them implemented into the upcoming versions.

2. Larger Enterprises Are Shifting to WordPress

Although it started as a platform for bloggers and small businesses, WordPress has evolved into the world’s dominant content management system. In fact, it is a system that even the largest corporations can safely rely on.

Enterprises like BBC America, Vogue, The Walt Disney Company and even The White House use it. The reason – it’s easy to customize and maintain, SEO friendly, and, at the same time, it can handle enormous traffic.

Furthermore, WP is home to a large community of developers, freelancers, hosting providers, and agencies. They all contribute to sustaining and making the platform even better every day.

This makes WordPress the preferred choice of companies that want to facilitate their web presence. This is due to the variety of plugins, themes, and custom-made solutions it has to offer.

3. Growing Popularity of Headless WordPress

In addition to seeing more organizations adopting WordPress as a CMS, we can also expect them to embrace headless web development. Although, WP provides great flexibility to the back-end part of web development, when it comes to the front-end there are still a few limitations, and this is where headless WordPress comes in.

As people access the web from multiple devices, content needs to be displayed properly on each one of them. A headless CMS makes this possible. By separating the backend from the front-end, headless enables a much more agile approach to web development.

In particular, it gives web developers the flexibility to build various functionalities, then deliver these components to any platform and device using external publishing tools – i.e., Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

As a result, in 2023, thanks to the wider adoption of headless WP, marketers and web developers will be able to perfectly render content on practically any interface, thus creating better digital experiences for users.

4. The Expansion of WooCommerce

One of the top goals of 2023 for WooCommerce is to help business owners run their stores more efficiently and improve customer service.

That said, WooCommerce is already used by a majority of the top one million eCommerce sites out there. For 2020 alone, there were over $20 billion in sales, almost double than the year before.

To help outmatch these sales revenues in 2023, WooCommerce plans to adopt more of WordPress’ search engine optimization functions, as well as implement improvements in inventory maintenance, payment getaways, and marketing features.

Other upcoming improvements that businesses may be looking forward to are the enhanced implementation of chatbots and augmented reality.

5. The Growing Popularity of Drag-and-Drop Page Builders

Even though nothing beats the quality of a professional custom-built website, drag-and-drop page builders are a good starting place for beginners. They give newbies the tools to create a website without using any code. Furthermore, one of their greatest benefits is that they allow the user to see what the page looks like as they are building it.

WordPress has been designed to be one of the least complex web development and design platforms. Over the years, this has given the CMS a great competitive advantage and made it the first choice for inexperienced users. So it’s not surprising that we are witnessing even further progress in the area of simplifying web page building.

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With phase three of the Gutenberg project, 2023 will allow full-site editing instead of single pages and/or components. This will provide even more power to beginners and will enable them to take a more holistic approach to how they create their websites.

6. Voice Search Optimization

With the increasing adoption of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home, in 2023, we can expect that voice search will be an essential part of web development.

According to Narvar, nearly half of all online shoppers use voice search to find products, and research by Perficent shows that this is the second most used feature on mobile devices, after web search.

Thanks to the growing popularity of voice search, in 2023, we can anticipate website owners and WordPress developers to focus on its optimization along with specialized voice search plugins, and long-tail keywords that are closer to conversational speech, rather than the written word.

7. Much Better Performance and Accessibility

Website performance and accessibility have been areas of major improvement for WordPress in 2021 and will continue to be important for the foreseeable future.

WP’s Performance Team has been on a mission to improve the overall functionality of WordPress, themes and plugins included. During their kick-off meeting on November 2, 2021, they identified four key focus areas: images, JavaScript, website health, and analytics.

So in 2023 we can expect more updates, advancements, and new features in these areas.

Additionally, we can expect some accessibility enhancements as well. The planned changes for WordPress 5.9 include updates to the Gallery Block, more focus on Rich Text, better weight descriptions for screen readers, and more.

Wrapping Up

The world of web development is very dynamic, and each year we continue to see new trends and emerging technologies.

And 2023 is no exception, it will be an exciting year for everyone who lives and breathes WordPress, and we look forward to, amongst other things, making the web a more collaborative and inclusive space.

Innovations in functionality, eCommerce, performance, and accessibility will definitely impact our favorite CMS, as well as the WordPress community.

The possibilities are practically endless, and we, at DevriX, are excited to see them in action.