Scalable by Design: Building a Website That Grows with You

If you’re currently designing or redesigning your business’ website, you’re probably bogged down with a lot of decision-making and planning. One important strategy is to consider how your website will change as your business grows. This is why any business should build a website with a scalable design. That way, in a year or two from now, you won’t find yourself with another redesign and another whole swath of decisions and plans. We’ll explain what scalable design is and how you can ensure your business’ website is flexible for the future.

The Importance of Scalability

Designing a website is a costly endeavor in time, energy, and associated funds. That’s why you want to design a website with flexible functionality. A lot can change within a year or two for a business. Products, services, or content offered may double or even triple in that time. Each of these will require their own pages and media. The number of users may also steadily grow, demanding more on the hosting servers.

If a website has not been developed to easily scale, it will quickly experience growing pains. The website may become difficult to navigate, start to slow down, or even fail to load for users. This will mean a full redesign and the associated costs. However, building a website with growth in mind will allow the website to continue functioning optimally without needing an annual or biennial redesign. It also means all those new visitors won’t encounter a dysfunctional website that will damage the credibility of your business, but instead take comfort in the sleek user-experience they expected.

Website Scalability vs. Scale

Designing for scalability does not mean simply going overkill on your website’s resources, such as getting more servers or hosting resources right from the start. This is a difference between designing for scale and scalability. For example, it’s not efficient to pay for a scale of hosting services with resource limits designed to handle 1000 concurrent users, when the website averages a tenth of that. The same is true for data storage for your website. Scalability means ensuring these can be expanded when necessary. Thus, designing for scalability is efficient both in maintaining a design’s lifespan and in ROI.

Strategizing Scalability

Designing for scalability can be tricky. We can’t predict the future, and sometimes even the most reasoned anticipations fail. Nevertheless, there are many strategies and considerations that can help ensure a website will more easily grow for expanded functionality.

Scalable Website Structure

A website’s structure or the “sitemap” is a design’s backbone. It determines how pages are laid out. A logical and well-organized structure ensures that customers can more easily navigate around the website without getting lost. When designing this structure for scalability, consider how certain pages should be hierarchically organized. What are the overarching categories for the website, such as products, services, information, etc. How might these categories grow or need to be further subdivided? For example, there may be only a few individual products currently, but if those expand to ten, twenty, or even a hundred, the structure should be able to handle the addition of new categories so that navigation remains intuitive.

Scalable Features

A hierarchical organization is important for a website’s user experience and scalability. Just putting a list of 100 pages or products in front of a user will lead to confusion. Another scalability design tactic is considering features that can aid with scalability that help users narrow down material. For example, a filter function is excellent for scalable design. These use categories and tags assigned to products or pages to help users refine what they see. Just as you can design a scalable hierarchical website structure, you can design a scalable hierarchical set of filters which can also expand over time as more categories or tags need to be added.

Templates

It’s inevitable that a website will eventually add a new page or product. Designing that page from nothing takes considerable time. However, since websites are best made consistently, most product and content pages will be designed similar or even identical. This is why scalable designs use templates, and most web platforms offer templates such as WordPress and Shopify. These templates have a preset layout which allows a new page to be added much more quickly because the specific contents are put in place. For example, a product page template will only need the product and its details to generate the page according to the template. Uploading one, twenty, or two hundred products all at once will make no difference. These templates will have to be made when designing the website initially but will save far more time in the future.

Scalable Hosts

Another key decision when designing or redesigning for scalability is to pick a scalable web host. There are few things to consider when designing for scalability. First, look for a host that provides free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)/TLS (Transport Layer Security). These are essential for a website’s security. You will also want to look at the storage capacity provided at different plan tiers. Free hosting might provide ample storage space for now, but if your website surpasses that limit, how much will additional space cost? Similarly, check whether the host restricts the number of monthly visitors. Depending on your current website users and how fast it is growing, that also might limit how flexibly your website can scale.

The Scales of Flexible Design

Scalable web design may mean some more initial effort in a website’s design or redesign, but it saves much more time and resources in the future. It helps ensure an efficient and effective website for multiple years. Even with these key considerations we’ve discussed, there are other potential considerations for scalable and flexible web designs. If you’re curious about these other considerations, what web platforms or hosts would be suitable for your website, or want help in your new design, contact our web design team.