The importance of scalability and flexibility in your digital experiences

When working with all these factors, building a platform that can grow and adapt seamlessly is essential. Investing in these elements from the outset ensures that your digital experience remains robust and responsive, capable of handling increased traffic, integrating new features, and pivoting to meet changing needs without significant overhauls.

In this post, we’ll look at the importance of scalability and flexibility in web development, providing key considerations and strategies that will help you future-proof your digital presence.

What does it mean to have flexibility and scalability?

Although flexibility and scalability have slightly different meanings, they go hand-in-hand when it comes to websites and online products (or at least they should).

Prioritising flexibility means:

• Being able to adapt to changing circumstances – new technologies and trends, changes in your industry
• Responding to user expectations and incorporating user feedback – working in an agile way to incorporate feedback loops and provide the most possible value
• The ability to add and roll-out new features or new digital experiences in your ecosystem quickly and easily – rather than making wholesale changes on a longer development cycle, you’re able to continuously iterate and improve

Incorporating scalability means:

• Allowing for increases and uplifts in traffic, API calls, data stored and processed, and users
• Being able to support business growth – adding more versions (for example having a multi-site which targets different geographics and languages) and experiences seamlessly
• Supporting the storage and processing of larger volumes and different types of data
• Being able to seamlessly integrate with more platforms and software across the organisation as needed

Essentially, by prioritising both of these things in your digital strategy, you ensure you’re ready for change. Whether that’s a change in scale, or change in requirements, your digital experiences should be able to effortlessly shift and evolve to support those.

Refactoring Tiviti to improve flexibility

We helped Tiviti launch a revolutionary offering in the telecoms industry by building and launching a connectivity-as-a-service platform that enabled customers to have complete visibility and control over their network in one convenient place. During our partnership with Tiviti, we identified the opportunity to refactor their codebase in order to make deployments more efficient, as well as make future integrations and developments easier to implement.

Key benefits of prioritising flexibility and scalability

We’ve already briefly hinted at some of the main benefits of focusing on creating a flexible and scalable website and/or digital product. So let’s dig into a few specific benefits of having those attributes on your radar when building and launching.

Future-proofing

“Future-proofing” may sound like a bit of a buzzword, but it’s a really important consideration when it comes to digital strategy. Developing and launching something which works specifically for your circumstances and needs in the here and now is fine – but it’ll be more costly to pivot to updates and improvements further down the line if you don’t bake scalability and flexibility in. As we’ve covered, there are two types of change you need to be prepared and future-proof for: technological change and market/business change.

1. Technological change

This could include new versions of software you need to integrate with, different types or larger volumes of data you need to process, a new security threat you need to be aware of and prepared for. You could also group an uplift in traffic, users and therefore things like API calls in with technological change – it’s anything that impacts the underlying framework and infrastructure of your digital experience(s).

2. Market or business change

Change that’s going on in your market – whether that’s driven by you internally or by the wider industry, can impact your digital strategy and it’s vital that you can respond quickly to that. Expectations from your customers and prospective customer will be evolving all the time – you can ensure you’re meeting them by having a framework for incorporating their feedback into development. You may have a shift in priority or focus internally that necessitates a change in processes or a new aspect of your digital experience to be launched relatively quickly. All of these things can be better planned for and responded to if flexibility and scalability are baked in from the beginning.

More cost-efficient

Creating a foundation for your digital strategy that prioritises scalability and flexibility saves you investment in the mid to long-term. According to our research, organisations who opt for ongoing development and maintenance to their website/digital product rather than wholesale changes over longer periods can save up to 26% on development and support costs. It’s much more cost-effective to have your infrastructure grow effortlessly with you rather than having to build for where you are now and then repeat three years later.

Creating a foundation for flexibility and scalability

Go Custom, not off-the-shelf

When it comes to web applications for a particular business need, there’s often a range of ready made solutions designed for your particular problem and industry. But off-the-shelf solutions are by their very nature inflexible and difficult to scale. Investing in a custom web application or digital product is the first step on the path to true flexibility and scalability – you control the codebase and the roadmap, so new features can be added as and when you need them to be.

Building the right infrastructure

Launching a website or digital product which will enable effortless growth starts with selecting the right tools and technologies to build on. Your digital partner will advise on the best tech stack to suit your needs from the outset – which will include everything from which content management system (CMS) is best to use to how everything should be set up and configured. If right for your particular project, harnessing technologies like headless – where the frontend (what the user sees) is separated from the backend (where the content is managed) – can also unlock more flexibility and scalability. Because of the separation, the frontend and backend can be managed and developed independently – enabling you to plug multiple frontends into the same backend system, and scale different parts of your ecosystem separately from each other.

Utilising a digital design system

A key part of building trust and authority with your audience is presenting a consistent visual identity. Lots of organisations have brand guidelines, but we have often find when we begin working with someone, this doesn’t extend to digital. Having a defined style guide for digital helps you to maintain consistency while rolling out new features and experiences much more quickly and efficiently. A digital style guide is more commonly known as a digital design system – consisting of a set of reusable components/blocks and key properties like colours, font styles and sizes, button styles, and adjustments for screen sizes and responsiveness. Having a digital design system in place speeds up the ongoing process between design and development – like in our project with Utilita Energy, where our digital design system enabled our engineers and their internal development team to effortlessly grab properties and code for each style and component to reuse in subsequent projects.

Securing ongoing support

This post has hopefully emphasised the importance of having a suitable framework in place for not just maintaining but also continuously developing a digital experience that’s scalable and flexible. Scalability and flexibility can be prioritised through an agile approach by separating development into feature-based chunks. This allows for more releases in a shorter timeframe and easier integration of user feedback. But agile doesn’t work for every project, and even if you haven’t got a programme of sprints planned, it’s still vital to the longevity of your website or digital product that you secure a framework for support, maintenance and continuous improvement. At the very least, having a support plan ensures all aspects of your website or digital product stays up and running and performing consistently

Key takeaways

• Prioritising flexibility and scalability is key when developing a website or digital product that will keep delivering value
• Flexibility is about being able to adapt to changing circumstances like user needs, market trends or internal priorities
• Scalability is about being ready to copy with things like uplifts in traffic or volume of data processed, as well as supporting business growth
• Having the right partner and the right approach will help you to build a website/digital product with scalability and flexibility baked in – helping ensure the following elements are considered:
  • Developing a custom solution rather than having to work around an off-the-shelf one
  • Building the right infrastructure around the right technology, including selecting the right CMS
  • Using a digital design system to help you roll out consistent-looking experiences more quickly
  • Setting up an ongoing support and development plan

Need help building and launching a scalable and flexible website or digital product? Get in touch and let’s chat about your project.