2020: the best digital resolutions for tomorrow's web!

At the beginning of this year we all have new goals and new resolutions in mind. Among our resolutions for 2020: to enjoy the beautiful beaches of Mauritius and Madagascar. And above all to open our new offices in Paris!

The end of 2019 was marked by the invasion of personal assistants into homes with the increase of voice searches. But also the much-anticipated 5G and its promise of faster Web access. This new year will surely be decisive for many companies.

This article is about helping you start this new decade on the right feet. You will find some interesting digital resolutions that you should consider to optimize your website.

Web marketing strategy resolutions for a better conversation

SEO : Google BERT for a natural language queries

You've probably heard of "BERT" recently in digital marketing. Since last December, Google has launched in France its learning machine algorithm, aka BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). This is a game changer for digital marketing!

But how is BERT impacting your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy? As in make-up, BERT wants a "natural" effect: written content adapted to voice requests. No more keyword sequences to appear on the first page of Google.

In clear, write for other human beings rather than trying to please software. BERT also likes mobile-friendly websites with a fast page load for users' queries.

 

 

A more fluid and interactive web user (UX) experience

According to the latest Cisco study, video content boundaries have extended to social networks and is expected to reach 82% of global Internet traffic by 2022. Videos are no longer social media's ( facebook, twitter, instagram...) privileges anymore. Now' is time to be creative and use as much video as possible for your content marketing!

You should create a make-over of your basic pages. Make marketing efforts for your important pages like "About Us", "About Us" or "Our Services" and add fun and personalized videos. It is cost effective and will definitely help index your landing pages. This inbound marketing could make the difference in front of competitors who prefer a UX of traditional marketing.

Audit your website and set your objectives.

In 2019, hackers have been busy with many events. They successfully hacked major cities, governments, businesses, hospitals and schools around the world. (Small list here)

What about you? Between cyber attacks, ransomwares, data breach, formjacking and small web incidents ...  Did you get hacked without knowing it? You definitely do a security audit on your institutional or e-commerce site. It will help you maximize your business objectives for 2020.

 

 

Software resolutions for a viable website:

Change is the only thing constant on this planet. No industry resists change. Innovations bring changes to the current trends in the IT industry.

Of course, the same goes for trends in software design and development. That's why it's important to keep up to date with new versions of the frameworks and software you use for your website.

 

 

Here are software updates to do for 2020 (ASAP) :

 

1. PHP 8 : the shift to real time

At the moment we don't have any information about the next features of PHP 8.0 yet. However, the PHP-based community is speculating about the inclusion of JIT (Just-in-Time) in the new version.

2. Symfony 5: prepare to move to the next level

Often the core of many PHP framework, Symfony announced in November 2019 the release of its version 5.0. for July 2020. The long time support branch Symfony 4.4 will be released at the same time to align the end of maintenance and the end of life.

3.  Magento 2: Farewell Zend

If your e-commerce platform is still on Magento 1, please note that this version is no longer supported. It's time to migrate to one of the Magento 2 versions. You'll see the difference between a Zend and Symfony kernel.

4. Drupal 9 is coming : a simplified upgrade

Still in CMS with a Symfony core, let's talk about Drupal 9 planned for June 2020. Symfony 3 (Drupal 8 kernel) will be at the end of support in November 2021. This give you another year to migrate to Drupal 9 (Symfony 4) with its updated dependencies.