The year 2024 has reshuffled the technical priorities of web projects. Front-end frameworks are stabilizing, generative AI is integrating into production pipelines, and above all, accessibility is moving from a recommendation status to a regulatory constraint. We observe a clear gap between what mainstream articles focus on (animations, dark mode, chatbots) and what is actually changing architectures and budgets.
WCAG 2.2 and the European Accessibility Act: the regulatory framework redefining web projects
The publication of WCAG 2.2 as a W3C recommendation (October 2023, updated in December 2024) has introduced criteria that most production sites still do not meet. Among the most significant additions: accessible authentication, minimum touch area sizes, and requirements related to cognitive accessibility. The outdated criterion on syntactic analysis has been removed.
What is changing concretely is the articulation with the European Accessibility Act (directive 2019/882). This directive covers e-commerce, banking services, digital books, and electronic communications. Its implementation by member states was scheduled to start on June 28, 2025, which means that in 2024, technical teams should already integrate these constraints into their roadmaps.
We recommend treating accessibility as an architectural element, not as a finishing layer. A WCAG 2.2 audit at the end of a project is much more expensive than accessible design from the wireframe stage. Undersized touch areas, authentication paths relying solely on complex cognitive tests, and insufficient contrasts on interactive elements: these are all points of non-compliance that require structural revisions.
To keep up with the news from La Star du Web on these regulatory and technical topics, it’s a good habit to adopt when managing multiple projects in parallel.
Headless architecture and server components: web development trends in 2024
Headless architecture is no longer a curiosity. In 2024, the separation between the back-end (CMS, PIM, database) and the front-end (client-side or server-side rendering) has become established in e-commerce projects and content-heavy sites. Headless CMSs allow the same content to be distributed across a website, a mobile app, and in-store kiosks without duplicating business logic.
React Server Components have changed the game on the front-end side. By shifting part of the rendering to the server, they reduce the amount of JavaScript sent to the browser. The result: lighter pages, shorter Time to Interactive, and better Core Web Vitals scores without resorting to aggressive lazy loading techniques.
This trend is accompanied by the adoption of GraphQL as the querying layer for APIs. Instead of multiplying REST endpoints with oversized responses, GraphQL allows the front-end to request exactly the necessary data. On an e-commerce site with complex product sheets (variants, stock, reviews, media), the performance difference is measurable.
Microservices and technical decoupling
Decoupling is not limited to the CMS. Cross-functional functions (search, recommendation, payment, user management) are tending to become independent microservices. This approach facilitates scaling and continuous deployment, but complicates observability. Without distributed monitoring, an incident on a microservice can degrade the user experience without triggering an alert on the front-end.
Generative AI in web workflows: beyond the chatbot
The majority of articles on web trends for 2024 summarize AI into two use cases: chatbots and content generation. We are seeing deeper applications in production chains.
- UI component generation from mockups: tools convert wireframes into usable front-end code, reducing prototyping time on short-cycle projects
- Automated analysis of user journeys: AI identifies friction points in analytics data and suggests A/B test hypotheses, where an analyst would have spent several days manually segmenting
- Optimization of visual assets: intelligent compression of illustrations and images based on display context (network, screen size, loading priority in the page)
- Detection of accessibility regressions: some CI/CD pipelines integrate automatic checks based on WCAG criteria, triggered at each deployment
The trap remains the same as with any automation: AI accelerates production but does not replace human review. An automatically generated component may be functional without being accessible. AI-produced content can be fluid without being accurate.
Web eco-design: performance constraint or web design lever
Eco-design is no longer a marketing argument. It aligns with performance and user experience concerns. Reducing page weight, limiting server requests, optimizing colors and graphic elements to consume less energy on the screen side: these technical choices simultaneously improve loading times, Lighthouse scores, and carbon footprints.
Concretely, this involves making deliberate web design decisions:
- Favoring vector illustrations (SVG) over heavy bitmap images when the style allows
- Limiting web fonts to a maximum of two families and using subsetting to load only the necessary glyphs
- Removing unused third-party scripts (obsolete tracking pixels, social widgets loaded on all pages)
A high-performing site is almost always a sober site. Mobile visitors with degraded connections are the first beneficiaries. And they represent an increasing share of traffic on most online sites.
Measure before optimizing
We recommend auditing the actual weight of the most visited pages before launching an eco-design project. The Pareto effect applies: a few elements (autoplay videos, uncompressed image carousels, redundant analytics scripts) often concentrate the majority of the weight. Correcting these points yields immediate gains, measurable in Core Web Vitals and perceptible by users.
The web trends for 2024 converge towards the same conclusion: performance, accessibility, and sobriety are no longer finishing options. They are architectural criteria that must be decided upstream, from the technical framing stage. Teams that treat these issues as late fixes accumulate technical debt and expose themselves to regulatory non-compliance starting in 2025.
