With a constantly changing online landscape, it can be difficult to keep up and know what topics are truly noteworthy or what best-practices can actually be useful to your business.

Luckily, we at Seven Ages Design have done some of the legwork for you by putting together this list of four web development trends we think are worth taking note of as you move forward in 2019.

Does the following situation sound familiar? You click on a URL and wait as the page loads at an agonizingly slow speed, only to find out that a huge image took up the majority of that load time.

If there’s one thing we at Seven Ages Design know, its that there’s no reason a website can’t have both engaging visual content and seamless UX in 2019. That’s why we expect to see web developers spend more time optimizing the size of the images you see online.

Optimizing a website’s images helps decrease load time by shrinking the size of the files that a user’s computer pulls from the server the website is hosted on. Additionally, since search engines try to direct users toward websites that can quickly and effectively answer their queries, this decrease in load time will also help boost your website’s SEO. Finally, the reduced file size of optimized images will also make it easier for you to create backups of your website.

Long gone are the days of flooding your webpages with as much keyword-stuffed content as possible in the hopes that your website’s ranking will increase. Knowing this, we expect to see an increased emphasis on delivering thoughtful and engaging content online in 2019.

To keep users reading to the very end, a website’s copy needs to deliver value by containing detailed information relevant to the terms users are searching for. This increased engagement with a website’s written content will be noted by Google’s algorithm, leading to a boost in the website’s overall ranking.

Incorporating a healthy dose of links to both your inner pages and other websites throughout your copy is crucial for strengthening your website’s reputation as a credible resource. Furthermore, getting other websites to link their users to your written content (known as backlinks) is also important for establishing your website’s authority to search engines.

Finally, optimizing your written content for voice-search will only continue to grow in importance. However, people don’t voice-search in broken phrases or word chunks. They use whole questions to find what they’re looking for. This means that web developers should begin incorporating questions into their writing that match exactly how a voice-search user would phrase them, and then immediately follow up with a thorough answer.

In a recent study by Alert Logic, it was found that the majority of surveyed IT professionals are most alarmed by the increased risk of data breaches, privacy infringement, and confidentiality breaches in the current business environment.

This level of concern might seem overzealous. However, even a small data breach can be disastrous for the affected business and its customers.

For starters, they’re extremely costly; according to a recent study by IBM, data breaches cost businesses an average of $148 per record lost. Not only that, but customers will shy away from doing business with a company who doesn’t appear to make security a priority.

It’s not as if these are isolated incidents, either – the frequency of data breaches worldwide is on the rise, and they’re only getting more impactful with each passing year.

With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that organizations are taking the time to replace their website’s ineffective and outdated security systems with more impactful solutions.

Due to both their effectiveness and ease-of-implementation, we expect to see increased adoption of data encryption solutions like SSL certificates, a tool we here at Seven Ages Design proudly swear by.

Do you need help getting your site ready for 2019? Contact us today to discuss a future-proofing solution with our Web Development professionals!