The State of WordPress Design in 2024: Trends and Insights

Find out what challenges wordpress designers are facing today.

Successfully designing a new website sometimes involves predicting the future.

At least in a small way, the design decisions you make when building a website influence the way users will interact with that site later on. Making the wrong decisions now could mean seeing your website face an early retirement as user experience trends change.

Elementor is one of the most reputable WordPress website builders on the market, and it recognizes the fact that design trends are in a constant state of flux. Designers who gain insight into today’s trends can position themselves better to capitalize on tomorrow’s.

That’s why we polled thousands of wordpress designers and creators to find out more about where the WordPress community is going. We sent our survey to users through dedicated mail, published it in our magazine, and posted it throughout the WordPress community. Learn how to Streamline WooCommerce Pages for Elementor

The result: We received over 5000 valid responses with valuable demographic data and wordpress design trends impacting today’s creators. 

These responses show some of the most timely insights into the WordPress industry available today. We’re sharing these insights with wordpress designers like you so you can use them to build a better business strategy and grow your brand successfully.

If you’re ready to start, let’s dive into that data.

First, we asked about demographics

Our survey began with some questions about the demographics of WordPress design professionals. We started by asking for their age, and this is what we found:

The largest age group is between 35 and 44 years old. There are significant numbers of users on both sides of that spectrum, with a slight tendency towards the younger end (25-34).

The WordPress community is growing every year. A trend towards younger creators may suggest that the new people getting involved in web creation are getting younger overall. We plan on analyzing data over multiple years to find out for sure.

Next, we asked WordPress web professionals to identify their gender:

About three out of every four identified as male.

That leaves nearly a full quarter of web professionals who identify as female. This is a significant number, and a higher one than reported in similar surveys years ago. It indicates a growing trend that aligns with the broader IT sector, where women make up one quarter of the technical workforce at large enterprises.

Next, wordpress designers top concerns when creating new websites

We asked our survey respondents to rate the concerns they have when creating new websites. We identified eleven different concerns that impact the web creation process in different ways. 

Let’s cover the top three:

1. Performance

WordPress wordpress designers are keenly aware of the performance demands they put on web infrastructure. They also know that Google has made the Core Web Vitals Score a must-have for SEO success.

Website performance has become a critical part of wordpress design. The faster and more smoothly your website runs, the better the overall experience of using it is. Designers who aim for ultra-fast page load times and excellent mobile responsiveness have more to earn in today’s marketplace than ever before.

You can see this for yourself using Robin J.E. Scott’s Fastest Website in the World as an example:

• Copy the Fastest Website in the World’s URL.
• Paste it into PageSpeed Insights and hit Analyze.
• The results speak for themselves – a perfect 100 for desktop and 90+ for mobile.

But there’s more – this hyper-optimized website is built on WordPress. Any WordPress user can reach similar levels of success. All you have to do is use an efficient website builder that doesn’t burden your website with unnecessary code, upgrade your hosting service to a top-rated managed hosting solution, and cut down on plugin bloat.

2. Design inspiration

Finding the right inspiration for a wordpress design project will always be challenging. If you don’t have accurate, actionable data about your clients’ users or their preferences, it gets even harder. Many WordPress web designers have to start from scratch.

At the same time, you want your designs to be unique. Websites should express the creative spirit of their designers. But it’s easy to overstep boundaries when they aren’t clearly communicated from the start.

This is why many designers turn to easily configurable templates when doing project discovery. They ask clients to show some examples of websites they like and try to understand what design principles link those websites together. Some go one step further and use Elementor’s Full Site Kits to expand the conversation to backend functionality and user experience design.

Some of the design trends that are beginning to impact the WordPress industry include:

• Scrollytelling. This method involves turning the web experience into something like an animated story or a comic book. Website visitors scroll or click through content phases at their own pace, letting the website tell its own story in the process.
• Nostalgia. Many web creators are turning towards the past for design cues and inspirations. Analog typography and vintage imagery can provoke powerful emotional responses in people, especially when combined with classic imagery and retro visual effects.
• Delight. Delivering unexpected positive feedback is the core principle here. Encouraging web animations, gestures, and microcopy can give character to an otherwise dull web experience. This approach can dramatically improve the experience of difficult and complicated processes, like doing your taxes or applying for a loan online.

3. Optimizing communication

Managing remote web design teams is complex and demanding. Agencies now operate under remote-enabled work policies, which means you don’t always get immediate feedback. That can spell trouble when clients change their minds or demand new implementations at the last minute.

Today’s wordpress designers need to invest in project management tools that can optimize communication between project stakeholders. That means giving instant access to live updates to your clients and their partners, while enabling your own team members to quickly receive and accommodate new requests. Tools like Monday.com and Clickup can play a major role improving the efficiency of client communication and workflow processing.

WordPress web designers: From the client’s perspective

We also asked wordpress design clients to rate some of the qualities and characteristics they look for when starting new projects. These are some of the things that today’s web clients care about most when choosing which designer to work with:

There are a few important pieces of data here:

As a web designer, you should feel justified asking for higher prices in return for a narrowly defined design aesthetic and specialist tech expertise. If you can add ongoing marketing or branding services as well, you should package them directly into your design services from the start. 

Furthermore, aiming for personalized service may generate better results than relying on portfolio examples of customer testimonials. Your clients feel like their projects are entirely unique, and they want you to treat them that way.

Start designing with the future in mind

We hope you’ll use this data to improve your web design business and position your brand to succeed in tomorrow’s WordPress marketplace. Nobody can truly predict the future, but the more you know about your industry, the better you can position yourself to accommodate its changes.

Acodez is a renowned web development company and web application development company in India. We offer all kinds of web design services to our clients using the latest technologies. We are also a leading digital marketing agency in India, providing SEO, SMM, SEM and Inbound marketing services at affordable prices.

For further information, please contact us.