18 Top B2B Web Design Trends You Should Consider

What do Visitors Expect from a B2B Website?

Are you redesigning your B2B website in 2022? You’re not alone.

In the wake of the pandemic, countless businesses have not only adapted or changed their offerings. They’ve also changed their websites to reflect clients’ expectations, from self-service options to mobile-first designs and lightning-fast download times.

But what about the design aspect? What are clients looking for in terms of an aesthetic experience?

Working with a B2B web design isn’t an easy task. First impressions are significant in this sphere, so to build a profitable online business, you need to emphasize the appearance of your website.

Therefore, compliance with the latest B2B web design trends discussed below will be a great advantage for an online resource. This post focuses on the main features and best practices of B2B websites.

What is B2B Web Design?

There are several different business models – B2B (Business to Business), B2C (Business to Consumer), C2C (Consumer To Consumer), and C2B (Consumer to Business) with their specific characteristics. Therefore, every online project dedicated to one of these models has distinctive features.

For example, the purpose of a B2B site is to connect with a customer representing another business. Therefore, a B2B website should be concise, simple, and easy to use.

Top B2B Website Design Trends in 2022

A modern B2B website is an essential online tool for generating leads. We have selected 18 top B2B website design trends to keep your site up-to-date. Of course, time makes adjustments to the development of design trends. However, we have picked up stable trends in web development that are used now and will be in demand in the future:

Mobile optimization

This one is imperative.

As of the fourth quarter of 2021, 63% of all searches originated on mobile devices. Including B2B and B2C, this is likely due to the increase in the number of people working remotely since early 2020.

If your business does not have a mobile-first, potential customers are far more likely to leave than suffer through an unappealing experience. What’s more, it could affect your placement in the search engine results pages (SERP). Since July 2018, Google has prioritized mobile page load speed as a key metric when determining a website’s search result ranking.

Inclusive design

Inclusive design affects every step of the B2B website design process—from strategic decisions regarding the website’s target audience to its tone of voice and graphic representation. These thoughtful insights help accommodate all genders, viewpoints, experiences, and situations.

Where accessibility focuses on making a design-friendly to people with at least some specific physical or cognitive limitations or differences, inclusive design is much broader. Inclusive design focuses on creating a user-friendly layout for the widest range of people.

Minimalism

Less is more – this statement sounds especially relevant in 2022. Website users are ordinary people, tired of the abundance of information in our digital age. Keep your site simple so they can understand it right away. Then, when users land on your site, they should feel calm and relaxed and think, “This is what I’m looking for,” or “Oh, this will help solve my question.“

This effect is especially in demand on B2B websites with complex business models, services, or products. By showing content in small portions to be swallowed, we involve users in exploring the site. In addition, the design should be neat, airy, and include only the most essential elements.

More app-like experiences

If you think about how most of us spend time on the web these days, we do much by using apps with a heavy focus on user experience and interaction.

Who says a B2B website can’t be more app-like? Features designed to give clients a fun, interactive experience are becoming more popular for the simple reason that people like them. They’re a great way to keep a prospect on your site longer. Give them something memorable, and improve their perception of your brand.

Artificial intelligence

You might already be familiar with AI elements on B2B websites. Some of them are chatbots. In 2022 they will evolve even more and transform the web experience in the process of human-like interaction. Besides offering round clock support to users, bots will likely be able to talk in a more “human” way and make customers feel more connected directly to a company.

When it comes to B2B design, using AI on a website is all about improving the prospective customer’s journey and making a positive impression of the company. Chatbots are a part of the outstanding UX that makes users feel that a company cares about their comfort.

Working in B2B, you must know that this trait is critical for successful collaboration. When a service provider cares about the client’s satisfaction and success, it may begin a long-term partnership.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia can exert a powerful draw during times of crisis, and that’s certainly been the case during the pandemic and post-pandemic era. Millennials are now in their 40s, and just like generations before them, nostalgia serves as a source of comfort.

Designs that evoke traditional media like print or TV, the ’90s or early 2000s, and the aesthetic trends of bygone eras are reassuring. They can bring people comfort when they visit your site —without the attendant racist, sexist, and other problematic references—as long as they make sense with your brand.

Interactive elements

Attracting a user to your site is an achievement in itself. But, at the same time, when visitors come to the site, you need to keep them. Using small animations, interactive elements, and dynamic scrolling is a great way to highlight content areas to grab the attention of your visitors.

Using interactive features, you add visual interest to the site’s content while not cluttering the design with unnecessary details.

Kinetic typography

Along with moving images, many designers are experimenting with moving text—kinetic typography.

Text that changes as you hover with your mouse or tap a screen guides a viewer’s eyes across a page and can help tell your brand’s story or show its personality in much the same way colors, images, and other design elements can.

Dynamic effects

Background video has been in vogue for several years now, and this trend is still relevant.

More and more designers incorporate motion elements into B2B website design, be it background video, animation, or dynamic scrolling effects.

Personalization

Personalization is one of the biggest B2B web design trends in 2022. When a website offers content and information relevant to a user, it also impacts the overall UX. Therefore, more and more companies are moving towards personalized web experiences that encourage user engagement and offer web visitors precisely what they have been looking for.

Enhanced customer experiences

Lately, there’s been a higher focus on enhancing customers’ experience. You want to provide a website layout that makes everything easy to find while appearing organized. You don’t want your visitors to think about navigating the site — it should just feel natural.

You should stick with familiar layouts and focus on streamlining your content to achieve this. You don’t want to use a format that takes a lot of thought to navigate through. Potential customers should have an easy time finding what they need. If it takes too long, they may give up.

Content-oriented design

Not so long ago, web designers, starting to develop a site, thought primarily about its structure, assuming that the content would fit into the given framework later. Unfortunately, for the B2B segment, this approach is already outdated.

The B2B website design process has become more iterative in recent years. This approach allows you to create a design in parallel with a continuous analysis of the results obtained and correct mistakes made in the previous stages of work in time. So, instead of creating a standard layout where to place content later, designers now develop layouts that sync with the content.

Design Thinking has dominated the B2B segment this year. An anthropocentric approach solves many problems, especially user experience, and provides more continuous development, learning, and creativity opportunities.

Micro-interactions

The magic of micro-interactions is stunning. It makes the web user experience more exciting and compelling. Do you remember a slight change when you hover over any website element or a button? It is a micro-interaction.

From the most straightforward types, like the color change of a button, to more complicated ones, like the change of the angle of view, microinteractions vary and make your B2B website look alive.

They make the user’s time on a website more enjoyable and eliminate negative user experience when elements take a long time to load or if any other slight issues occur.

For example, if a web page is loading longer than it should be, in the meanwhile, you can show an animated countdown to entertain a user. It also helps users feel “more control” over a browsing process, significantly improving the overall web experience.

Scrollytelling

Interactive website elements have become increasingly popular, and this user experience animation trend will only continue to be at the heart of B2B website best practices in 2022.

Scrollytelling transforms a long-form brand story into an interactive experience.

Visual content adds a deeper layer of meaning, communicating more effectively than words alone. For example, scrollytelling rolls out the details of a brand story in an engaging way to keep people reading.

Sticky menu

As I mentioned above, long scrolling websites are one of the biggest trends of 2022. The growing number of mobile users is forcing designers to rethink their previous approaches to website design. Long scrolling is an entirely different functionality and, in many ways, a new aesthetic.

Nevertheless, endless scrolling is not always a good solution for commercial sites – many visitors get lost when they can’t find the typical menu items or even the back button.

The only way out is to create sticky fixed menus that are always visible, no matter how long the user scrolls down the page. Navigation, in this case, is always available, even if the visitor has scrolled the page to the very end.

Big, bold type

In our fast-paced digital world, users have less time to spend on websites. For this reason, web design adapted to include large, bold titles and shortened messaging to capture the user’s attention and decrease the time to convert.

The larger heading tags are usually paired with smaller sub-text content if more information is needed. Brutalism in digital design is a style that intentionally attempts to look raw, unadorned, and bold.

Minimalist images

Many designers also tend to use minimalist images on their websites. This style uses simplicity but still leaves an impact on the viewer. Often, the image consists of a single object falling into a grid structure. Minimalism is also great for providing potential customers with an easy-to-navigate page.

Revival art direction

It’s pretty difficult for a modern user to concentrate on the content. As a result, people began to read less, preferring to crawl the site’s content and stay only on the most exciting pages. This trend is quite dangerous for businesses, and designers have figured out how to solve this problem.

The content uses large panoramic images, beautiful visual effects, and bright design elements to make it easier to scan small text fragments. All this allows you to grab the user’s attention and let users decide if they want to know more.

Images have always played a key role in web development, but their importance has grown exponentially. Therefore, choosing the right visuals will be vital for many designers, so stock photography may soon become obsolete.

Today, commercial website owners must empower designers to work with individual photographers and artists to get unique visual content that fully matches the brand image. In addition, B2B sites today need to engage users not with large blocks of text but with compelling visuals.

This approach will require a paradigm shift in B2B website design, as businesses and commerce still prefer to use inexpensive stock images to create their visual identity.

Keeping up with B2B Website Design Trends

B2B web design changes constantly. You’ll want to take a few steps to ensure you can keep up! We recommend that you follow blogs and other sites that offer information on the latest trends. You also should build a network of web designers and talk with them often.

The importance of B2B web design for businesses today cannot be understated. As long as your website looks good, is easy to navigate, and is accessible to everyone, you’ll be sure to generate interest — and business.

What are the Best Practices of B2B Web Design?

Web design and development are fast-evolving, and 2022 will feature a higher level of personalization, security, voice search optimization, and implementation of new AI technologies.

To make a B2B company stand out from its competitors on the web, you should also be aware of graphic design trends that can perfectly complement web design and a brand style. Beautiful digital illustrations, engaging animated videos, and lovely microinteractions add more character to a website, help a brand shape its voice, and demonstrate the company’s full potential to its prospective customers.

These B2B web design trends, with several others, are the most requested in 2022. Of course, the future of these trends remains a topic of discussion, but there is no doubt that the most important trends will dominate for a long time ahead. But user experience is the starting point for B2B website design today and remains the primary trend.

If you need a B2B website design, you can entrust it to the award-winning team at PixoLabo since we know what your target audience expects. We will implement any idea for the web or mobile design. So please do not delay and reach out to our award-winning team!

Do You Need Better B2B Website Design?

Do you want a new or redesigned business website? Our team of professional designers will be happy to help you with this. But, first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.

Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your B2B web design needs, let’s talk! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.

And if you are still not sure how to decide which of these B2B website design trends will most benefit your business or product brand, let’s talk. We will listen to you, answer your questions, and determine the best B2B web design solutions for your business!

Did you Incorporate B2B Website Design Trends?

Do you have anything to add to our B2B website design trends? Perhaps you have applied some of these trends or came up with some of your own. What results have you achieved?

Feel free to add your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our post with your audience!

Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita