Tips for Building a Scalable Website

Like all digital products, a website is not a static thing. Technology is evolving faster than ever and it’s important that your website reflects this. It might sound dramatic but an outdated site can be a death sentence for your company. Whatsmore, it takes an estimated 0.05 seconds for someone to form an opinion about a website — that’s not a lot of time to convince potential customers to stick around. Scalability is defined as the ability of a site to handle an increased number of visitors without affecting the user experience. Ideally, your website should be able to grow as your business does and cope with the extra traffic expected from increased customer numbers. Whether or not you can scale your website really depends on decisions made at the start of the development process. Any web development company in Melbourne will tell you that there are several key strategies you can implement to ensure that your website continues to run smoothly, regardless of traffic numbers. Continue reading to learn a little more about what smart decisions you can make to end up with a website that can be adapted to fit your current needs. Characteristics that affect scalability A successful website is one that has been well planned from the outset. Most likely, your reasons for wanting to build a company website include increasing your customer numbers. Well, you need to think about what might happen when this occurs. What’s the point in having increased numbers if your website takes too long to load? It’s one thing to attract customers to your site, it’s another entirely to keep them there. Being aware of these characteristics that affect scalability can help you plan a website that is actually useful to your business: ● Architecture: How information is organised and prioritised on your website. ● Back-end design: The quality and cleanliness of your code. ● Hardware limitations: Number and quality of servers. ● Third party components: Plugins and additional applications you include on your website. What does a scalable website look like? Fortunately, building a scalable website is not difficult. If it were, companies like Facebook and Google would simply not be able to cope with the millions of users who access their servers daily. However, if you are expecting your online presence to take off, it’s a good idea to work with a team that provides web development services from the outset. Planning scalability is a science — do not rely on estimates and uninformed decision making. A scalable website will include the following features and characteristics: Cloud Storage The more customers you have, the more data you will need to store — securely. Cloud storage is a great solution that can help you reduce the load on your own servers while also keeping customer data safe and secure. Caching Caching refers to the process of storing data in a temporary location. On a personal level, you have probably used caching before when saving social media passwords to simplify the login process. When it comes to web development, you can also cache your own data. Doing so increases data retrieval performance, reducing the burden placed on your servers and decreasing page load time. Ultimately, your site visitors are the ones to benefit from this. Design Simplicity We all understand just how important web design is. However, design should not come at the cost of performance. Unfortunately, some of the most engaging web design elements can also be those that take up significant server space, throttling your site performance. Consider a simple, minimal design to tick all of a user’s boxes. Asynchronicity Asynchronicity refers to a type of parallel programming. Without getting too technical, asynchronicity can be used to reduce the lag between sending a request and a function being completed. It does this by dividing processes into discrete steps, where one step does not have to wait for the previous to be completed. Asynchronicity can be used to help reduce the effect that bottlenecks have on site performance. Load Balancing Software Load balancing software can be used to distribute incoming traffic across all available servers. This ensures no one server becomes overworked, which will have a negative effect on the user experience. As is the case with asynchronicity, load balancing is quite a technical area of web development. It’s best to speak to a professional who provides web development services to understand how your website can capitalise on this feature. Building a scalable website is about so much more than adding a few extra servers to the backend and hoping that you’ll be able to handle the traffic. Given how much you are investing in your website, it would be silly to not consider how well equipped it is to handle the customers you are hoping to attract. Speak to a web development company in Melbourne today to learn more about scalability and the strategies behind building a secure, high-performing website.