It doesn't feel right to be talking about trends for 2021 as we approach the close of this tumultuous year. Typically, we wait until the end of the year to begin projecting the trends that will dominate the coming year while simultaneously looking back at the ones that dominated the year before us. When it comes to front-end web development trends, though, it's a good idea to keep an eye on them more frequently.

Because front-end web development trends come and go so quickly, web development teams must stay on top of them in order to do their jobs properly. That's why I thought it'd be useful to scout the terrain to see what trends are gaining traction right now—and which ones will continue to reign supreme throughout the rest of 2021.

1.     Gatsby's Ascension

To better serve their customers, several businesses are developing single-page apps (SPAs). SPAs are quick to develop, easy to use, and give a simple user experience. However, they have one flaw: they aren't SEO-friendly. This is because the content on these pages is encased in a layer of JavaScript, which makes crawling and indexing difficult for search engines.

While there are a few things you can do to improve your SPA's SEO, web engineers have discovered that collaborating with Gatsby is a wonderful approach to avoid this problem. For those who are unfamiliar, Gatsby is a web development framework that combines React, GraphQL, and Webpack into a single platform for static website development.

Pre-rendering capabilities that work around the wrapping issue can be added to Gatsby. That's how Gatsby avoids having to render anything on the server when a request comes in all it's done at the application's development time. When a web crawler visits your SPA, it doesn't access the AP directly; instead, it gets a fully rendered HTML copy saved on the server, which makes crawling easier.

Such a method is both elegant and simple, and it solves a long-standing difficulty for web developers. That's why Gatsby is becoming a go-to framework for web development and why so many engineers are using it.

2.     Micro-Frontend Architecture's Popularity

Micro-frontend architecture is gradually gaining traction and establishing itself as an excellent approach to work on the frontend components of web apps and projects. This is not a matter of personal preference. This architectural design has already been embraced by companies such as Spotify, IKEA, American Express, and Starbucks. I have no doubt that more will follow suit.

The benefits of this architecture are the cause for the rising interest in it. Micro-frontend design simplifies development and maintenance by breaking the frontend into separate, semi-independent components that function loosely together.

This design is loosely based on microservices and aims to provide the same benefits, mainly more agility, easier development, and improved cooperation between developers working on different components. As a result, web development teams who adopt this design benefit from a smaller codebase, scalable projects, and independent deployment, which eliminates the need to deal with large or complex components.

3.     The Jamstack Firmly Establishes Its Position

Everyone seemed to be talking about Jamstack in 2019—and for good reason. Client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and pre-built markup were combined in the current web development architecture to deliver a better development experience with better performance and cheaper costs.

Jamstack continues to grow by impressing engineers in web development teams. If you ask me, that's an easy sale. Jamstack apps are more secure and give better performance by serving pre-built markup and assets across a content distribution network. It also provides a better developer experience, as frontend engineers can concentrate on the frontend without having to worry about a monolithic architecture.

That's not all, though. The utilization of the CDN, which dynamically compensates for any demand surges the app may have at any given time, makes Jamstack projects highly scalable. And when you consider that it's less expensive than other options (due to the hosting of static files), it's easy to see why so many developers are jumping on board the Jamstack bandwagon.

4.     React takes the lead.

If there were any concerns regarding React's popularity among JavaScript frameworks and libraries, they have been dispelled in 2021. According to the most recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the use of React is growing at an exponential rate. Indeed, React has eclipsed jQuery as the most popular web framework, with 40% of engineers polled professing to use it.

That's not all, though. According to the same survey, one out of every four developers wants to start using React, demonstrating the web development community's growing interest in this technology.

Given such figures, it's difficult to imagine React falling out of popularity anytime soon. In fact, it's very likely that its popularity will continue to rise throughout the rest of 2021 and into 2022.

5.     The King Is (Still) JavaScript

Finally, good old JavaScript has maintained its dominance in the programming world. The results of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for 2021 are conclusive: The language is used by 64.96 percent of engineers on a daily basis, putting it at the top of the list of the most widely used languages. In reality, this is JavaScript's 9th year in a row at the top, demonstrating that it is still the king.

"For most developers, programming is web programming," according to Stack Overflow, which explains the results. That mood will last until the end of 2021, if not longer. Given the language's prevalence and complete supremacy over other languages, it's impossible not to believe that.

Even Typescript's growing popularity and Google's drive for Dart don't seem to be enough to dethrone JavaScript. To summarise, we'll continue to use JavaScript to power many web development initiatives, owing to the language's adaptability.