Doc Pop’s News Drop: 5 WordPress Trends That Aren’t Going Away in 2019

Doc Pop’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4f5KTPTmo4?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

2018 was a year of big changes in the WordPress community and there’s no telling what new things we will see in 2019, but we are sure that these five WordPress trends aren’t going away anytime soon.

Love WordPress News But Hate Reading? My name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop!
Happy New Year. 2018 was a wild year for WordPress. After years of hype, we finally saw the release of WordPress 5.0 and the brand new WordPress editor. Despite all the controversy, the new release seemed to go over pretty smoothly.
Rather than a full recap of the past year, lets focus on the new year. Specifically lets talk about 5 WordPress trends that aren’t going away in 2019.
#1- Gutenberg- Remember 20 seconds ago when I said there was a new WordPress editor? (show clip) That new editor is called Gutenberg and it replaces WordPress’s old WYSIWYG editor. As the year goes on, we’ll probably stop referring to it as the “Gutenberg Editor” and just call it the “WordPress Editor”. Though you can still install the “Classic Editor Plugin” to bring back the old editor, the new editor will be the default experience for most users moving forward. Expect to see all of your favorite plugins going all in on the Gutenberg interface if that haven’t already and expect to see WordPress adopt this block based style for more than just editing posts. Soon we will see Gutenberg style editing features coming to themes and site customization.
#2 Passwords-
Each year we hear that passwords are a thing of the past. Though new technology keeps coming around, like biometric authentication or FaceID, they aren’t going to replace passwords anytime soon.
Here are a few reasons,
Passwords can (and should) be updated frequently. If your FaceID somehow gets hacked, it’s not like you can change your face.
Passwords also allow you to switch between devices. Want to sign in to gmail on your phone, then check it later on your laptop? You are going to need a password.
#3 Hackers- We can’t talk about passwords without mentioning hackers. We are still in an arms race between hackers and users, not just in WordPress but all over the internet. That’s why it’s so important to have a good password, but that’s not all. I highly recommend using a two factor authentication system on your site, like Authy or Google Authenticator. It’s also important to keep all of your plugins up to date and please please please keep your WordPress up to date. Matter of fact, I should have started with that. WordPress is constantly learning and improving it’s service to keep it safe, so it’s a good idea to just leave that autoupdate feature on so you don’t have to worry if your site is up to date.
#4 AI- It seems these days that you can’t land on an ecommerce site without getting some sort of pop-up chatbot asking if it can help you out. Many of these bots are simply rule-based, but as the state of AI improves we’ll probably see these bots doing more and more. Beyond bots, there are many WordPress plugins that use AI in interesting ways, such as After The Deadline, which uses an AI-driven contextual spellcheck, or to offer suggestions on how to improve your language.
Some sites, like Forbes, are even developing AI that can prepopulate articles with basic facts, such as relevant links, related articles, and images that might be related to a story before a human writer comes and finishes the post.
#5 Blogs- The golden age of blogs is long gone, and though WordPress has made a push away from just being “a blogging platform”, blogs are still around and important for most businesses to have. A few years back, it seemed that many brands were switching to facebook to share updates to their users, but then facebook switched how pages displayed to most users and overnight those brand pages stopped appearing in most pages. Most businesses learned their lesson and are once again embracing the art of the blog post. I’m not saying that brands will stop posting on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, but they are definetly realising it’s not safe to put all their eggs in one basket. Posting frequent blog posts to your site not only gives you more control over them in the long run, it can also help bring users to your site.
Those are my predictions for 2019, what are yours? Let us know in the comments below and we’ll see you next week.