How to scale your website: 4 things to consider

As your business continues to expand its online presence and reaches more people, the ability to scale your website becomes increasingly crucial.

In this post, we’ll look at:

• What website scalability is and why it’s important
• The technical aspects to consider when scaling a website
• The non-technical aspects to consider when scaling a website
• How to put everything in place you need to seamlessly scale your website

What is website scalability?

Scaling your website means improving its capacity to handle uplifts in traffic, data and user demands. These uplifts can be gradual, incrementally increasing over time, or you might experience a more sudden spike in demand. Either way, it’s vitally important that you’re able to both support the traffic numbers you get now, and the demand you’re likely to experience in the future. Failing to plan for these uplifts in demand could lead to significant dips in your website performance, or even downtime – delivering a subpar experience to your users and impacting your reputation and authority. A study by Google found that 53% of visits to mobile sites are abandoned if it takes more than 3 seconds to load – just one example of how a slow and poor experience can impact your digital presence.

Scaling your website – the technical side

Fundamentally, the main considerations around ensuring a website’s scalability revolve around its technical setup and architecture. To ensure that scalability is as seamless as possible, these elements should be considered right at the beginning of your website project. That way you can get on with growing your business and getting the most out of your investment without having to worry about performance being compromised further down the line.

Selecting the right tech stack

A web development agency with expertise in launching scalable applications – like Adaptable – will be able to assess the current demands on your website and recommend a technical setup which allows for planned and “unplanned” uplifts in traffic and data. This includes everything from where and how your website will be hosted, to how content will be delivered and the content management system (CMS) which best suits your needs both in the mid and long-term. For example, if we build a project with Enterprise WordPress, as WordPress is open source, the base system is extremely customisable and therefore easy to scale and add new features and functionality to as you grow.

Headless architecture

If you’re expecting and planning for significant uplifts in demands on your website in the medium term, a really solid option is building your website in a headless environment. Headless websites have the CMS (where you manage content) separated from the frontend (what the user sees). In the here and now, this improves the performance of your website as content doesn’t have to be rendered from the CMS each time the user loads a page – instead the content is served to them as a static version which is updated from a data layer via API. Setting up your website and ecosystem this way also helps with scalability. Headless architecture is very similar to microservices architecture – meaning large applications are split into independent modules based on function (i.e. your frontend and your CMS). These microservices or different elements can be scaled independently of each other – making it much more flexible and easy to scale.

Having the right support in place

Having the right foundation in place from day one is the key to growth and scalability, but you must also monitor the performance of your website and your infrastructure on an ongoing basis to ensure they’re holding up. In this sense, it’s beneficial to have a digital partner like Adaptable who can offer maintenance and support for your website. We can keep tabs on load and demand – monitoring traffic and any spikes, as well as staying on top of any downtime and addressing potential issues proactively.

Scaling your website – the non-technical side

There is another aspect to growing and scaling your website which is entirely non-technical and more to do with making sure you have the tools and processes at your disposal to adapt how you use your website to suit your needs.

Utilising a digital design system

A digital design system is a bank of reusable components for your website and/or digital products. It’s essentially like a set of digital brand guidelines, but rather than being “static” in a document, all of the components, their key properties (colours, font styles, etc) and associated code are held in a platform or tool where you can essentially grab and go. A great example of a digital design system in practice that you can openly view and interact with is the GOV.UK one. Having a design system in place enables you and your digital partner to accelerate the design and development process from new features and experiences in your ecosystem – there’s no need to redesign page templates or blocks from the ground up, as you have reusable components in place. As such the whole process is quicker and more efficient and the experience, look and feel of your digital experiences remain consistent. This enables you to scale your website and digital products much more easily without compromising on the trust and perception around your brand.

Read more about how we worked with Utilita Energy to do just that.

Prioritising iteration

We’ve already mentioned the importance of securing ongoing support when building for scalability, but what’s equally important is planning in ongoing development. Improving your website or digital product iteratively makes scaling much more seamless compared to making wholesale changes after a longer period of time where you might have to overhaul large parts of your infrastructure if they no longer support adding new features. Growing and adding to your ecosystem gradually over time is much more sustainable.

Key takeaways

• Scaling your website means preparing for growth and evolution in your digital ecosystem both internally and externally
• Technical considerations include selecting the right platforms and tech stack, assessing options like headless and securing ongoing support and maintenance
• Non-technical considerations include utilising digital design systems and prioritising iterative development

Looking to build and launch a website or digital product that’ll grow and evolve effortlessly with you? Get in touch to discuss your project.