Scalable Website Development: A Guide to Growth & Performance

As a rapidly evolving business, you need a solid digital presence—one where your website efficiently meets end-user needs, simplifies manual repetitive tasks, and eliminates operational inefficiencies. 

However, with a growing user base, complex transactions become part and parcel of your day-to-day operations. This is where most commercial websites fail – from downtimes to disrupted workflows and inefficient management of user interaction touchpoints, everything contributes to this inefficiency.

Article Shortcuts:

• What Are the Key Benefits of Scalable Website Development?
• How to Build Scalable Websites: Best Practices
• FAQs

Talking about real-world instances - a one-hour outage in Amazon cost the company an estimated USD 34 million in sales, and a 20-minute crash during Singles' Day sales cost Alibaba billions.

Do you think your customer-facing website will be able to handle the increasing load without crashing or slowing down?

For an expanding digital business, having a website that scales effortlessly is key. But how does fast and scalable website development help your business grow?

In this article, I have elaborated on the fundamentals of developing a scalable website, focusing on practical strategies to ensure your site can evolve and grow like clockwork.

Scalable Websites vs Web Apps: Key Differences & Why It Matters

There is widespread confusion about the functions of scalable websites and web applications. While strongly associated, they serve different roles.

A scalable website is like a vibrant brochure, capable of increasing and decreasing the number of users and content while maintaining reliability and speed. On the other hand, a web application is a real-time program that performs specific functions directly with a web browser.

However, both developing websites and web apps demand scalability, yet their functionalities use different architectures and approaches to accomplish it.

The website is your digital hi-hello, while the web app is the following conversation.

What Are the Key Benefits of Scalable Website Development?

Source: FasterCapital

No matter how on-the-go applications are for your users, the first stamp of digital credibility is a well-performing website. So, let’s figure out what is unique about these digital assets. 

• Global Access—A scalable website can target and serve a global audience, all thanks to its reliable server network systems.
• Higher Performance—For large businesses and enterprises with an international audience, it’s crucial to ensure that the website is fully functional. Withstanding high traffic, delivering glitch-free, immersive navigation, and meeting user expectations help prevent major revenue setbacks.
• Reliability and Security—Different server solutions and cloud migration, combined with database replication and fragmentation, help boost confidence in network security. Moreover, if anything goes wrong, the system immediately heals.
• Affordability—Cloud solutions make the scalable web system more seamless to manage and maintain. Such services are usually cheaper than in-house software and hardware maintenance.
• Potential for Growth—Any modifications you make to enhance the system or integrate new features and functionalities might impact your website performance if it isn’t scalable.
• Improved Loading Speed—One of the main reasons users get frustrated or leave your website is its poor loading speed. Scalable websites built with new-age technologies leverage several strategies, such as compressing images and content, caching, using a CDN, reducing redirects, lazy loading, etc., to reduce rendering time, which leads to client contentment, higher retention rates, and better revenue generation.
• Easy Maintenance and Updates—Scalable architectures often include expandable components that can be upgraded independently. This simplifies updates and maintenance processes, and you can modify certain parts without impacting the entire system.
• Enhanced User Experience—A scalable website offers a consistent, intuitive user experience, even during peak load and traffic. Thus, there are only rare chances that your users encounter downtime, errors, or slowdowns, which contributes to overall satisfaction.

How to Build Scalable Websites: Best Practices

Source: Medium

Building scalable websites for your business calls for a carefully curated tech strategy and a seasoned team that has the expertise to handle websites with complex interactions.  I have listed down some practical steps and best practices:

1. Choose the ideal technology stack

This is a make-or-break decision! The tech stack you choose for your business should be aligned with your business's long-term goals. Besides, your software partner must consciously choose not to rapidly disrupt your tech ecosystem.

The focus should be on maintaining business continuity. The key is not always using emerging technology but leveraging technologies to their full advantage.

2. Optimize frontend performance

When building scalable websites, it is best to draw diagrams of your system. This will help you understand how every component of your website communicates and recognize the hotspots where you need to do more work to keep everything functioning seamlessly.

3. Integrate caching methods to amplify website speed

You must use cache mechanisms whenever possible. I have also observed that minimizing the use of databases helps keep the website smoothly functional. A pro tip is to consider having multiple layers of cache.

4. Unlock more possibilities through data consistency and database scaling

Maintain data consistency across different services. And you don’t need to get afraid when using multiple databases. Also, you can utilize the same database for different microservices.

You also need to keep in mind that every microservice should be capable of working independently.

5. Use asynchronous processing for scalable websites

Don’t put your app hanging on for extended questions. Utilize asynchronous calls wherever feasible. You need to ensure that every environment adapts to asynchronous logic as soon as possible.

6. Choose a stateless application infrastructure

Always keep your website stateless until you have the best reasons not to. Maintaining state throughout multiple scenarios of your services is challenging; however, it prevents the web system from horizontal scaling.

7. Simplify website queues and database queues

Identify functionalities that can be done at the side. You can use queries for simple functions like sending notifications or emails. Using queues helps you benefit from redoing tasks that failed before.

8. Utilize correct infrastructure options and patterns

Keep your code as cloud-agnostic to the fullest extent.

Don’t bind your code base closely with certain infrastructure providers. You can try solutions like DAPR that help keep your apps functioning without knowing what services are finishing certain activities.

9. Deploy a fail-fast policy to improve and trace system malfunctions

Whenever your system faces processing challenges, your web solution should collapse and be restored immediately for other requests. This helps you primarily suspend activities that are blocking resources for different tasks.

10. Choose the ideal tools for scalability monitoring

Record, review, and respond – your app almost becomes a living entity as it carries out and processes multiple user requests. You can take immediate action whenever new issues arise, try to visualize your app productivity, and log as many things as possible.

FAQs

1. How can I ensure my website scales effectively as traffic increases?

To scale your website efficiently, consider employing CDNs, caching, database optimization, load balancing, and horizontal scaling (e.g., integrating more servers) to distribute the load.

You can also use multiple cloud services supporting auto-scaling to manage higher traffic automatically.

2. What key drivers contribute to a website’s speed and scalability?

Database design, server performance, image optimization, caching mechanisms, optimized code, and content delivery networks (CDNs) are factors that impact a website's scalability and speed. Choosing the ideal tech stack and architecture also plays an important role.

3. What is the difference between speed and scalability in website development?

Scalability refers to a website’s capability to manage increased data or spiked traffic, while speed refers to how quickly your website loads and responds to user activities. A fast website offers a smooth user experience, while a scalable website helps manage performance as demands spike.

4. How can I ensure my website loads quickly?

The following are the best strategies you can follow to boost your website load speed, including:

• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Lazy Loading
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Image optimization

The Bottom Line

Crafting fast and scalable websites is a significant investment for any expanding business.

By following robust security and monitoring standards, improving your website’s codebase and design, and choosing the ideal hosting solution, you can achieve scalable web development that supports your business objectives and offers an exceptional user experience.

The first step is to identify seasoned professionals with proven experience in building seamless and efficient websites. Investing in developing a fast and scalable website today will ensure that your organization is fully prepared to take advantage of future opportunities and handle challenges.

Author Bio

I am Pratik Mistry, a rare mix of technologist and Executive Vice President in sales at Radixweb. My passion lies in helping companies grow revenues by delivering top-notch custom software development solutions and building value-based partnerships.