It’s that time again where we look ahead to what’s coming. We admittedly don’t love the word “trends” because it implies something fleeting, while our entire philosophy is about building sustainably and intelligently so websites will last. The word “trends” works great for a short headline, but this article is more about outlining what we see coming in all aspects of website design and development so you can be prepared to decide what could work for your business.
We’ll warn you: artificial intelligence is covered a lot in this article. Love it or hate it, it’s here. While we are all learning to find ways to allow AI into our workflows in order to create efficiencies, it’s critical to use it in a way that keeps humanity strong! (If you’re curious, here’s how Kanopi uses AI for clients).
Let’s start with strategy.
Let the bots organize large datasets
One thing that AI is very skilled with is helping aggregate large, disparate datasets. Think competitor research, user behavior data, or analytics reports.
Our content and UX strategy teams use a combination of Chat-GPT and Claude to analyze large datasets, identify patterns, and turn complex information into clear, human-readable insights. AI can be used here to lessen the manual lift behind time-intensive activities; work that once took weeks can now be completed in just a few days, freeing our strategists to focus on the high-impact thinking that drives meaningful results for our clients.
As always, human guidance is key. A human needs to review the outputs as they come. It helps maintain accuracy, minimize bias, and ensure that AI outputs stay closely aligned with the project’s goals and broader strategic direction.
Agentic journeys & funnel flattening
AI agents (ChatGPT, Gemini, custom enterprise agents) will increasingly handle research, booking, donations, and transactions end-to-end, collapsing multi-step funnels into single-intent, conversational flows. Early adoption in 2026 will raise new questions about attribution, fraud, consent, and regulation.
What about website design, UX and content?
Make your content speak AI
AI isn’t just reading your content anymore. It’s deciding whether to recommend you at all. If your site isn’t structured in a way that ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI agents can understand, you’re basically invisible to a growing chunk of how people discover things online. We’re talking semantic HTML, well-structured and agent-friendly APIs, stable URLs, and clean information hierarchies, and structured data … all the stuff that makes your content machine-readable. This is no longer optional. Think of it as SEO 2.0, except now you’re optimizing for robots that are way smarter than the old-school web crawlers. Otherwise, expect degraded representation in AI-driven search and assistants.
What Kanopi is doing: We start with AI-led content audits that reveal exactly where your content stands. What’s discoverable, what’s buried, what’s redundant, and what’s completely invisible to AI systems. These audits don’t just identify problems, they inform strategy, helping you prioritize what to fix first based on actual impact.
Scale your content without sacrificing your voice
One of the biggest challenges teams face is keeping content fresh and consistent across dozens (or hundreds) of pages. You’ve got style guides gathering dust, content editors struggling to match tone, and updates that take forever because every piece needs multiple rounds of review. AI changes that equation completely. But only if it’s trained on your voice, not generic internet speak.
What Kanopi is doing: We’re building custom AI workflows that learn your brand’s style guide, tone, and content patterns, then generate copy variations that actually sound like you. But we’re not just handing you a robot and wishing you luck. We’re creating prompt libraries and content templates tailored to your team’s specific needs. Need 10 variations of a CTA? Done. Want to update product descriptions across your catalog while maintaining consistency? Easy. We’re giving your content editors AI tools that work with them, not against them, so they can keep sites current without burning out. It’s like having a writing assistant who’s read every piece of content you’ve ever published and knows exactly how you like things done.
Design for speed and intuition
Nobody wants to click through five pages to do something an AI can handle in one conversation. We’re witnessing a significant shift toward interfaces that anticipate users’ needs and deliver them faster. Think calmer designs, less clutter, smarter personalization that doesn’t feel intrusive. Multi-step funnels are collapsing into simple, conversational flows because that’s what AI agents are built for and what users now expect. The best interfaces in 2026 will feel less like navigating a website and more like having a helpful assistant who intuitively understands your needs.
What Kanopi is doing: We’re using AI-powered tools to streamline our design workflows that create meaningful efficiencies for our downstream development teams. Our Figma to Claude process enables rapid component prototyping. This means we can create more, iterate faster and refine work, without putting timelines or budgets at risk.
Unifying theme and atomic/component-driven design
A major trend shaping 2026 web design is the continued move toward unified, component-based systems. Instead of designing every page from scratch, we create a consistent library of reusable interface elements, buttons, cards, forms, navigation patterns, that work together seamlessly across your entire site. This ensures visual cohesion, faster development, and a smoother user experience.
What Kanopi is doing: we take this further by pairing modern design tools with cutting-edge AI development workflows. Using Figma’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), our design files connect directly to advanced AI coding tools like OpenAI Codex and Anthropic’s Claude. This means our designs are translated into high-quality, production-ready code with exceptional accuracy.
Once components are built, we use Google Chrome DevTools MCP to let AI validate how each piece actually renders in a real browser, catching visual issues early and ensuring the final experience matches the design vision.
From there, our developers ensure each component can be easily managed in your CMS. Finally, we build end-to-end functional tests that automatically watch for regressions, ensuring that as your site evolves, nothing breaks along the way.
The result is a unified design system powered by intelligent workflows that keeps your site visually consistent, easy to maintain, and ready to scale.
Other things we see coming
- AI can serve as a valuable design research partner, helping designers quickly surface trends, industry-specific design patterns and assessing the accessibility of design components as they are being designed.
- Aesthetically speaking, we’re noticing a shift to calmer user experiences; minimalist interfaces, fewer distractions, more clarity, and clearer information hierarchies.
- Lastly, compliance for WCAG and “Consent UX” or “Trust UX” — the design of user interfaces and flows that ethically obtain user permission for data collection and use — is becoming mandatory. See the “Trust, Privacy, Consent & compliance in the next section for more information on this.
There’s even more happening in Website Development (whether it’s Drupal, WordPress, or custom code)
Just like in strategy, content, and design, development is also undergoing a meaningful shift. These aren’t fads. They’re structural changes in how teams build, maintain, and future-proof websites. Here’s what we see shaping 2026:
Server-side rendering & resilient delivery
We’re watching teams swing back toward server-side rendering (SSR), static site generation (SSG), and progressive enhancement. This isn’t nostalgia, instead it’s a response to what users (and AI systems) now expect: fast initial loads, predictability, resilience, and content that’s easily discoverable by both humans and machines.
Modern frameworks absolutely still have a place, especially when rich interactivity is required, but we’re seeing a clearer separation between where complexity adds value and where it gets in the way.
Rethinking architecture: agents vs. complex crontends
As AI agents begin handling more of the “consumption layer” — surfacing answers, facilitating transactions, navigating information — the value of extremely complex, client-heavy architectures is being reconsidered.
For informational sites and straightforward user journeys, well-structured, semantic content often wins over front-end flexibility. Complex frontends will continue to power robust applications, but many marketing and discovery-focused sites are trending back toward hybrid or server-first models.
Agents are already consuming AI-friendly APIs, and with evolving authentication, they’ll get even better at interpreting content over time. With the current pace of innovation, we predict this will be a delicate dance throughout 2026.
AI-accelerated technical debt
AI coding tools are incredible accelerators, but they’re accelerators in both directions. Yes, they speed up delivery. They also multiply code volume, inconsistency, and architectural drift if teams don’t stay vigilant.
This is where strong standards, clean patterns, and senior oversight matter more than ever. Without them, organizations end up with AI-generated technical debt and fragmented prompt/model sprawl — problems that cost significantly more to untangle later. Kanopi builds governance into our workflows so speed never comes at the expense of long-term stability.
Trust, privacy, consent & compliance
As AI becomes embedded in websites and applications, the way we communicate trust changes too. Users need clarity around how their data is used, how permissions work, and what AI agents are doing on their behalf.
“Trust UX” is becoming its own discipline. Transparent consent flows, auditable agent actions, and understandable data policies are now core engineering requirements, not afterthoughts. And with legal scrutiny around consent management on the rise, we expect this to intensify in the coming year.
Predictive personalization & AI-driven adaptation
Users increasingly expect experiences that adapt to them, including personalized recommendations, context-aware content, and layouts that respond to user intent. Achieving this requires real AI infrastructure: data pipelines, model governance, and ethical frameworks.
Basic rules-based personalization won’t cut it anymore. Organizations that want to deliver anticipatory digital experiences will need to invest in more holistic, AI-driven systems.
Accessibility & inclusion as architectural foundations
Accessibility is no longer something you “add on” during QA. It’s becoming a structural requirement. Semantic HTML, non-JavaScript critical paths, and robust WCAG compliance are essential for AI discoverability and multimodal search (and are just good practice regardless).
As agents rely more on clean, machine-readable content, inaccessible markup and JS-gated experiences will carry increasing penalties. Building inclusively from the start is now both an ethical responsibility and a competitive advantage.
As for what Kanopi’s doing specifically, here are a few exciting projects keeping us engaged:
Drupal CMS, Drupal Canvas, and Site Templates!
We’re hard at work in the Drupal community helping Drupal CMS development continue. From that, Drupal CMS 2.0 will be released in January 2026, complete with a working Site template example building on top of Drupal Canvas, the new editor coming to Drupal.
There are AI integrations, theming in the browser, and instant component creation. This all will minimize development cycles and empower content creators to prototype and publish as they see fit.
We will be working to release a Site Template in the initial launch of the Drupal.org marketplace, so check back with us in the spring at DrupalCon Chicago.
AI Tooling to increase content editor and developer efficiency
We’re working to build AI workflows and tools into our tech stack and into Drupal and WordPress sites to help all of us be more productive in our day to day tasks. We’re connecting Figma to coding agents, as well as connecting automated audits to ticketing systems, content, image, and audio generation in content management systems. Basically, we are working in a way that we can do more with less.
Things are moving quickly, but the basics are still critical.
It’s a lot to absorb when technology moves ever faster, but it’s important to remember that the basics still hold true: your website needs to work for the humans that use it. Your visitors need the information they came looking for, and your editors on the back end need to be able to make updates that keep the website performant, accessible, and fresh.
There’s always going to be more we can do to make websites better, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed with everything that’s coming. But remember this: you don’t need to know everything, you only need to know the things that will make your website meet the goals you’ve defined for it.
We hope this post helps inspires you with ideas on how to make your website stronger in 2026!
