Since the introduction of WordPress as a blogging tool by its American founders Matt Mullenweg and Englishman Mike Little in 2003, over 20 years ago, WordPress has continued to evolve to meet the changing demands and needs of website owners. It has now become a content management system that allows the creation of almost all types of websites.
The year 2024 is expected to bring many new developments related to the WordPress system, its plugins, and tools. It is crucial to be aware of these new trends in system development if you aspire to create a website using WordPress or if you currently manage a site with it. This knowledge will enable you to adapt quickly and gain competitive advantages that set you apart from your competitors. In this article, we will introduce you to the most important new trends for WordPress in 2024.
1. Facilitating Collaboration Among Team Members
So far, WordPress has been weak in enhancing collaboration among team members, especially when it comes to concurrent editing of the same article or page, compared to online document editing tools like Google Docs and Microsoft Word. Unlike the latter two, which provide powerful features that facilitate collaboration by multiple individuals on the same document, WordPress restricts access to a page in the editing phase to only one person.
In 2024, WordPress is set to undergo significant improvements to make collaboration easier through the Gutenberg editor. This will be part of the third phase of the editor’s development process, where substantial collaborative features are expected to be introduced. These features include the ability to:
- Editing the same article or page by multiple users simultaneously, similar to Google Docs.
- Adding notes within the editing page and responding to them, along with suggesting content modifications.
- Initiating discussions among several individuals within the same editing page.
- Facilitating content work, review, and publishing by creating sections to clarify editing requirements and goals, implementing publishing locks until specific conditions are met, and more.
The development process to enhance and facilitate collaboration in WordPress will also include various other collaborative features. For instance, the ability to assign multiple individuals as authors for an article without the need for plugins. These features, or at least a portion of them, are expected to be introduced in upcoming WordPress updates in 2024.
2. Integration with Artificial Intelligence
At present, there are no native projects to integrate artificial intelligence into the core of the WordPress system by default. The development team insists on refraining from incorporating artificial intelligence into WordPress until it is fully ready. However, several plugin development teams have recently integrated AI features into their plugins, and it is certain that these features will be further developed and supplemented with new ones in the coming months.
Among the notable plugins currently utilizing artificial intelligence and expected to continue enhancing their features in the near future are:
- AI Engine: Encompasses various artificial intelligence tools, including a chatbot and AI-powered content generator integrated into WordPress.
- Rank Math SEO: Provides custom AI features to enhance on-page SEO, assisting in URL and title writing, keyword suggestions, and more.
- WordLift: Adds structured data to site pages after content analysis based on artificial intelligence.
- Voicer: This plugin helps convert text into speech using artificial intelligence and machine learning, supporting over 275 voices and 45 languages.
3. Increased Reliance on WooCommerce for Building E-commerce Stores
WooCommerce remains the most widely used e-commerce solution, surpassing all other tools for creating and managing online stores, including Shopify and Squarespace. Its market share accounts for nearly 9% of the total number of websites, not limited to e-commerce stores alone.
The number of e-commerce stores relying on WooCommerce is likely to grow in the near future for two fundamental reasons. First, the overall number of e-commerce stores is increasing over time. Second, WooCommerce’s share of these stores is also on the rise.
The reasons behind the increased reliance on WooCommerce in recent years, as well as in the coming months, are attributed to various factors. Chief among them are the system’s high customization capabilities, seamless integration with payment gateways, and the presence of a comprehensive and robust system for managing e-commerce stores.
4. Default Support for Multilingual Websites
Currently, you need to use custom plugins, such as Polylang, to make your website multilingual since WordPress does not inherently support multilingual sites. Not all features of these plugins are free, and you may need to purchase an add-on to access professional features that enable you to create a fully integrated multilingual site.
Default Support for Multilingual Websites WordPress developers aim to make the system support the creation of multilingual sites and content in the future. The initial features in this regard are expected to be released at the beginning of the development of the fourth phase of the Gutenberg editor, where you are anticipated to manually translate your articles and pages initially. Subsequently, additional features will be added to facilitate making the site multilingual.
6. Improving WordPress for Voice Search Optimization
This is not a trend related to the development of the WordPress system itself but rather to websites powered by it. Voice search operations have become common on smartphones, and voice-enabled devices have gained popularity in recent years. Therefore, it is crucial to work on optimizing your WordPress site to excel in voice search results.
You can enhance your WordPress site to lead in voice search results by following a set of important tips:
- Targeting keywords in the form of questions and other long-tail keywords.
- Using structured data to facilitate search engine understanding of content.
- Adding a section for frequently asked questions related to the topic you are discussing in your content.
- Ensuring your site is fast by following WordPress speed optimization practices.
- Verifying that your site and its content comply with general SEO guidelines as explained in the article (SEO Explained for Beginners: Your Guide to Understanding Search Engine Optimization).
7. Mobile-First Design Dominance
Due to a large and growing number of users relying on smartphones to visit and browse websites, it is expected in 2024 that the dominance of mobile-first design philosophy will increase. WordPress developers will be concerned with how the elements they design appear on smartphones first and then on other devices like computers.
WordPress site owners should ensure that their sites align with this philosophy, not only because it makes their sites more compatible with advanced plugins and templates but also because adopting this philosophy contributes to improving the user experience. The consequences of its adoption include:
- Making the website compatible with various screen types, ensuring responsiveness and smooth performance regardless of the device and screen size.
- Contributing to making the site faster, as a website designed based on the mobile-first design philosophy tends to have higher loading times on smartphones.
- Helping improve the presentation order of content on the page, displaying the most important content first to align with users of smartphones.