Web design and WordPress theme trends never stop changing and evolving. Every year we see new and innovative trends showing up all over the web. Some design trends come and go, but the best of them usually stick around for a long time.
But, why should you worry about staying updated and following these trends? Well, if you’re in the market for a new WordPress theme, it’s important that you choose a theme that matches with current design trends. It’ll make your project feel current, and offer you a design that won’t feel dated overnight!
We’ll be exploring this concept more, and looking at what the best WordPress theme trends are this year.
Why Do WordPress Theme Trends Matter?
Here are a few reasons why you’ll want to consider a theme that’s on-trend:
- To make sure that your theme design appeals to your visitors.
- To make sure your theme follows current design standards.
- To stand out from the crowd.
- Get ahead of the competition.
- Improve user engagement and user experience.
- And it helps you to establish authority.
So, whether you’re looking for a great theme for your new WordPress site or simply looking for an upgrade, here are some of the most popular theme trends of 2019 for finding the perfect WordPress theme for your website.
Motion Effects Animations
Adding attractive animations to website designs is a big part of offering an entertaining experience to users. But, everyone’s already seen all kinds of CSS animations and hover effects. It doesn’t excite people anymore.
The newest trend in WordPress theme animations is motion effects. This is a more advanced strategy that creates animated experiences based on user movements like mouse-hover and page scrolling.
While this is not an entirely new trend in web design it will go mainstream in WordPress themes this year. The first signs of the trend appeared when Elementor page builder announced motion effects as well as scrolling and mouse animations for the plugin. This will certainly open new doors to WordPress theme designers and allow them to make more attractive theme designs using the page builder plugin while incorporating stylish motion effect animations.
Section Scrolling Themes
Section scrolling is a creative new design trend that aims to replace parallax scrolling once and for all. Even though it’s based on parallax scrolling effects, section scrolling offers a much smoother and convenient experience to users.
Instead of moving the entire web page when scrolling down, section scrolling allows you to browse a website one section at a time. It removes the need to create sticky menus and having to scroll all the way back up or down to find navigation links.
This convenient new design trend is already catching on and you’ll see plenty more WordPress themes adopt the strategy this year.
Overlapping Content Design
There used to be a time where designers were forced to make websites according to certain standards just to keep the website fully functional. This kept them from exploring creative designs and making unique website experiences. Thanks to new frameworks and advancements of page builder plugins, designers are now able to fully express their own styles of designs through WordPress themes.
The overlapping design trend was born as part of this new wave of creative theme designs. Instead of the perfectly aligned content arrangements, this trend creates unique layouts with overlapping content arrangements.
Creating such designs used to be a challenge, especially in terms of optimizing the website for different screen resolutions and mobile devices, but frameworks like Bootstrap and WordPress page builder plugins now makes the entire process easier.
Gradient Color Palletes
In recent years we saw a subtle rise in colorful website designs. This quickly made its way over to WordPress themes as well. Suddenly, using vibrant and vivid color palettes in web design wasn’t frowned upon. Instead, it made websites look more attractive and helped reach a more diverse range of audiences as well.
The next stage of this colorful web design trend is gradient colors. If you were to browse for WordPress themes in any marketplace, you’ll notice that the theme designs that stand out the most and instantly catch your eye are the ones with modern gradient colors.
Maybe it’s time for you to upgrade your website’s old flat design color palette and try switching to a gradient color design.
Fullscreen Overlay Menus
After going through several phases of menu designs from mega-menus to sticky menus and drop-down menus, the latest trend in WordPress theme menus is fullscreen menus that cover the entire screen to showcase the navigation links.
Designers have different opinions on whether this is an effective way to showcase links as it requires extra clicks to open and close the menus. However, others argue that it helps increase engagement as it removes distraction and encourages users to explore the other pages of the website.
Either way, the fullscreen overlay menu trend is rapidly spreading through WordPress theme designs. Whether you like it or not, this trend will likely stick around for a while.
Brutalism In WordPress Themes
Inspired by the popular architecture design style, brutalism is a radical web design trend that offers a completely unique look to your website than any other website design.
Just as the name suggests, brutalism in web design aims to deliver a raw and unusual experience by intentionally revealing the bare bones of a website design. For example, a site like Craigslist would be considered a brutalist website design if it were designed today.
WordPress theme designers are now slowly adopting this trend to design unique themes. The subtle incorporation of brutalism in WordPress themes actually makes the designs more attractive. We certainly don’t mind this trend catching on.
For Mobile Design
Making sure a WordPress theme is optimized for mobile devices used to be an extra task that most people rarely cared about. This changed with the growth of the mobile market and designers opted-in for making “mobile-first” theme designs.
70% of internet traffic now comes from mobile devices and it’s expected to reach 80% by the end of 2019. Making mobile-first WordPress themes is not going to cut it anymore. Designers need to start exploring “for mobile” designs with website experiences optimized and made for mobile devices.
WordPress themes often look better in desktop view. They are filled with animations, effects, unique content layouts, and parallax effects. Hopefully, this year designers will focus on creating such creative experiences for mobile users as well.
In Conclusion
Making your theme and design look and feel relevant is an important part of keeping your website up to date. Make sure to check for these rising trends when you’re searching for new WordPress theme for your next project.
