Top 3 B2B Web Design Trends in 2021

2021 has finally arrived, and with a new year comes new design trends! It’s no surprise that customers expect good user experience (UX) and responsive design, and are easily enticed by compelling website design. According to a recent study, 38% of visitors will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive, and 48% of people said that a website’s design is the #1 factor in determining a business’s credibility.

Whether you’re a small business, corporate company, or freelance, web design trends will never go away. As designers, it’s important to watch and implement these styles into your professional or personal website. How can we differentiate which technique is best suited for your business? After all, anyone can Google “2021 web design trends” and a stream of possible responses can appear. Here are a few of the most common B2B website design trends we’re seeing in 2021 for B2B marketing.

1. Homepage Video Banners

Animation and motion graphics are taking the world by storm. More and more, websites are popping up with impactful videos to catch their users’ attention. Videos implemented into homepage banners allow a website to make an impactful statement upfront without having the user read multiple paragraphs about the company and what they do. Last year, WordStream predicted that marketers who use video would grow their revenue 49% faster than non-video users. It’s no surprise that it made the cut for 2021 web design trends.

Although videos may add to a website’s aesthetics, we need to keep in mind the amount and time each video takes. Whether it be a homepage banner or video gallery, how the video(s) are uploaded can impact overall website speed. Having a video hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, or other video streaming platforms and embedded into a website is less cumbersome on overall site speed than uploading the full video directly to the site. Self-hosted videos are the worst offenders in terms of load time, essentially forcing every user to load the video directly from the company’s website server. 

Since no one has the time or wants to sit through an entire video on a homepage, many companies are showing a teaser video while utilizing a call-to-action for users to click and view the entire video via YouTube or other video streaming platforms. This is a much better alternative for users and gives them the option if they so desire.

2. Micro Interactions and Animations

Just like video, micro interactions and animations are a great way to keep the user engaged on a website. Subtle animations not only jazz-up a website but intrigues the user on a different level of experience than simply clicking a button. Micro interactions and animations can be a variety of types.

• Hover effects on images and buttons
• Icon animations
• Scrolling animation
• Hovering arrows
• Parallax 
• And many more

Subtle animations also help guide the user through a website by adding motion and leading the user to the end goal, conversion. Jakob Nielson’s study on human interactions between computers found that 0.1 second (100 milliseconds) a computer response will appear instantaneous to a user—so an animation lasting 100ms would be imperceptible to most people.

As always, developers and designers must be careful when adding subtle animation to a website. The animations should make sense to the content and layout of the design as to not overwhelm the eye. Remember those cheesy spinning graphics you can add to PowerPoint slides that make everyone sick? That’s what I’m talking about! Micro interaction and animations shouldn’t drive a website. 

3. Site Speed

We are all impatient people whether we want to believe it or not. As humans we want things fast and we want them now. Website speed is no exception. As an example, Pinterest reduced their perceived website wait time by 40% thus increasing their search engine traffic and sign-ups by 15%. This percentage may not seem like much but compared to the percentage of bounce rates on websites that take longer than 4 seconds to load, this is a big deal!

There are a number of factors when deciphering what affects website speed. Here are just a few to be aware of:

• Web Hosting
• Server Types
• Images, videos, and files
• Plugins

Site speed is an ongoing trend and in 2021 we are seeing more ways to combat this issue. Say hello to lazy loading and infinite scroll! The two are fairly similar but help websites in a big way. According to TheeDigital, Lazy Load ensures the web browser (like Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) will download only the content you see on the screen without wasting valuable server resources and time to load offscreen content that might never be seen. On the other hand, infinite scroll has been used by social media platforms for years and acts as a long continuous one-page site. 

Site speed and micro animations also go hand-in-hand. Developers and designers are continuously finding new ways to keep a user on a website. As your content loads, thanks to lazy loading, each image fades-in or pops up thanks to micro animations.

Final Thoughts

This cohesive experience between the 2021 web design trends we covered is changing the way humans interact with websites within B2B marketing. We know these enhancements aren’t going away anytime soon and more and more websites are implementing these techniques to set them apart from their competitors. The next time you or your company decides to create or update a website, consider these B2B website design trends. As always, we’re here to help – if you have any questions, please get in touch!