Website Scalability Explained
The art of achieving website scalability may be complicated – and we’ll go into that art later – but the concept is actually pretty simple. While some might think that every site is the same beneath the surface, the truth is that every website is different.
Some will be designed to deal with a lot of traffic, and others will be designed to deal with a much smaller number. Think of it like a room. If you’re running a business that you’re looking to scale, then you will need to extend that room to make it bigger, ensuring the infrastructure can deal with the greater demand.
Why is it Important?
It is important because a scalable website is a necessity to ensure a robust user experience. While your user base grows, your UX needs to remain smooth and responsive, just as it was on day one. If your website is not scalable, then it will undoubtedly have poor performance, slowing down and even becoming unresponsive, especially when there is a spike in traffic.
This essentially confounds your own success – as your business begins to grow, the end-experience of the user begins to diminish, causing a higher bounce rate and a failure to optimise your website to keep this traffic coming in.
What Makes a Website Scalable?
We mentioned before that there is an “art” to achieving website scalability, and this is true. But not everyone is an artist. That’s why it’s important to go with a website designer who can prioritise scalability in the first instance.
Here at XIST2, we use WordPress to enhance SEO and create professional-grade sites that can be updated and maintained daily.
The CMS is important in this instance – with a strong CMS, businesses can operate their site at scale, helping you to improve your SEO, user experience, and analytics, and ensure that the UX is optimised to deal with peak traffic.
Flexibility will also allow your website to adapt to market fluctuations, adapting to any changes as and when they happen, and easily integrating new features without any loss in the overall performance.
To give an example, if one of your products becomes popular overnight, then there will inevitably be an influx of traffic. A flexible platform will be equipped to cope with this influx and ensure that downtime is avoided while traffic surges.
Hosting must also be taken into account, as the attention span of users depends on it. With a steadily building server speed and performance, your website can continually load faster and, subsequently, users will stay longer on your website. According to recent studies, if a page loading time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the likelihood of people leaving the site grows by as much as 32%.
Securing the Future
This all comes down to the foundation of the website – the utilisation of the best, most flexible CMS and the best server speeds to create sites that can live up to the strength of a business, no matter how far it goes.
But while your website’s scalability should be ensured during its creation, it is also important to boost that scalability with a scalable content plan. This means defining the target audience for your content, developing a content model, establishing a process where content is continuous, informative, and reliable, and then repositioning depending on the trends of the industry.
In effect, you want your website to be like a digital, dynamic pamphlet of your company. It can start as a few pages, but it is capable of expanding in both content and user numbers – while also maintaining a steady speed and ease of use. If you can achieve this, then your business will be given the best chance of succeeding both in the present and in the future.
