As with all owners of web businesses, Magento web store owners know that a well-thought design is crucial to making a good first impression. And first impressions are important because nowadays, especially when using mobile devices, visitors decide within seconds whether they wish to continue navigating your website or not.

But the things that made a good design 10 years ago may not hold up nowadays. Design features evolve over the years, and some elements that made a brilliant homepage when it was first designed may slowly become outdated and lose their sparkle over time.

So, if you want to stay ahead of the curve and prevent your Magento web store from being considered a relic of the past, read on and find out our predictions for the most trendy design features of 2018.

Mobile Performance

We know this is not exactly a design feature per se, but we’re starting off with it because it is probably the most important aspect of web design nowadays. If you were to focus on a single topic from this list, this should probably be it.

Mobile traffic, as we all know, has been growing over recent years. It has already surpassed desktop traffic in the percentage of total web traffic, and it is going to rise even more. So, in a way, mobile users should be given even more relevance than desktop users.

As we’ve noted before, users of mobile devices are quite impatient and they expect results (almost) instantly. Therefore, the main things to focus on are mobile-responsive pages, making sure you show all the main elements on smaller screens, and, most importantly, having pages that are quick to load. You should keep these mobile guidelines in mind even when implementing the other elements that we mention in this article.

Negative Space

Minimalistic designs have been in vogue recently, and this trend will likely continue in 2018. It is not so hot anymore to stuff your pages with images, text and other items all over the place. Instead, if you remove some elements, you can give more emphasis to those that are left, like call-to-action buttons, by letting them breathe and clearing up the background. Sometimes, if a design is really cool, it can even use the whitespace itself as part of the design, by embedding text or an illustration into it.

Leaving plenty of empty space also means there will be a shorter number of heavy elements, like images, to display, which will make your pages load faster. Again, visitors will thank you for that, especially mobile ones.

Call-to-Action Buttons

Call-to-Action buttons are the bread and butter of eCommerce business owners, and Magento users are no exception. The key here is consistency: buttons like “Add to Cart” and “Proceed to Checkout” should be easily recognizable and be exactly in the same spot for every product page.

Other things to keep in mind are to use vivid colors for these buttons, possibly use a bold font and place them in an intuitive area, like next to the product image. Make it stand out but remember, don’t go overboard. Go for a clean and minimalistic approach.

Typography

We’re already seeing a lot of designs based on daring usage of fonts, and this tendency is likely to increase next year. Depending on the context, text can convey an idea even better than an image, and design-wise it can look even better. Try to mix up font sizes or even font types.

Using more text in detriment of images is also in line with the minimalistic trend. Another advantage of text relative to images is that it is a lot lighter and faster to load, yet another thing that benefits mobile users.

Animations

With the advances in web browsers and the appearance of technologies like HTML5, it is now much simpler to add smooth and lightweight animations to your web store. Feel free to do so, as you can expect to see much more of them in 2018, opposed to the flashy, distracting animations we had some years ago.

Besides being a pleasant visual element, animations can also be useful to display some extra content, like fading an image to display some text behind it, or even animating a logo between different forms to transmit the identity of the company. These actions can be automatic or triggered by a page scroll or by hovering the mouse over the item.

Cinemagraphs

You’ll likely hear a lot more about cinemagraphs in the upcoming year. They are like a hybrid between image and video, combining the ease of use of the first with the motion element from the second.

Cinemagraphs are quite peculiar, and not exactly like GIFs. Usually, they consist of a still image where only part of it is moving and have almost a magic feel to it. You can also program them to run only when a certain action is performed, like a scroll.

More than being used just to capture visitors’ attention, especially because they add some weight to the page, cinemagraphs can be used to convey relevant information, such as a 360-degree view of a certain product. Introducing one or more of these is a great way to add a modern twist to your web store.

Cards

Card or grid-based designs have been growing in popularity, and this trend does not show any signs of slowing down. The most successful example of a card-based design is probably the giant web and mobile application Pinterest.

First of all, grouping products or other areas of your business into cards help our brains quickly grasp how the website is organized. This makes navigation easier and more intuitive.

Secondly, this type of hierarchy works really well with mobile devices. Since the screen sizes are smaller, you can just swipe through the cards to find the one you’re interested in, and then click on it to expand and reveal what is in that category. The second level may also be divided into cards, and so on and so forth, making navigation in smartphones and tablets a breeze.

Personalized Experience

To wrap it up, we’d like to talk about offering your customers a personalized experience. As a web store owner using Magento or any other platform, it is important that your customers feel well treated and that they are special to you.

One way to do this is to give product recommendations like “Recently Viewed” or “Best Selling”. These features may be incorporated into a product slider that can even allow swiping through in mobile devices. Once again, this is similar to the card-based navigation that we’ve talked about.

The main thing to keep in mind is to really make it a joy for customers to navigate through your website. If you follow these tips that will be trending in 2018, you will be well on your way to do that.