This is the era when everything is fast paced and this rule applies to the websites as well. When users browse your website, they expect it to load quickly, they expect their profile pages to get updated immediately and they also want to purchase and checkout online within a limited span of time. You can be in business only if your website caters to the requirements of your users, otherwise there are other options available. High traffic websites like Facebook have instant and efficient website scalability in order to manage the massive increase in traffic.
Even through your website is not a high traffic website at this point of time, you expect it to grow and you are definitely working towards increasing the visitors on your website. When the traffic to your website increases, you also have to think about the UX (User Experience) of your website, it should be just as great as it was when you launched your website.
In order to deliver the best user experience, it is important to plan a scalable website right from the beginning, this will help you to handle the traffic spikes in a better way.
Here are 5 great tips to create a scalable website:
Web Hosting
It is perfectly fine to launch your website with the most basic web hosting plan, as you might not need a lot of resources in the beginning. However, while selecting a web hosting package, think in advance for scalability. As the users on your website increase, it is important to scale the resources and think of switching from shared hosting to virtual private server hosting or to dedicated or cloud hosting. Therefore, it is crucial to plan about the resources you need for your website before selecting the web hosting package. Moreover, if you are working on a WordPress website, you can opt for WordPress web hosting services that ensure easy scalability and seamless migration.
Website Services
Most of the websites provide with reading and writing services. The user of any ecommerce website enters the name of the product that he / she is looking for (write function) in the search box and then that product is retrieved for that user (read function). Therefore, both the ‘write’ and ‘read’ functions of the website should be fast. With business expansion, there will be a need for more storage resources and the need for quick retrieval of data; as there will be an increase in the number of queries at the same time. Therefore, it is crucial to make sure that your website has the required amount of resources.
Redundancy
Website redundancy should not be considered as an option. It is very important to have a redundant website to backup your business growth. In easy words, a redundant website is like a backup power option when the power goes out. You certainly don’t want the loss of any important data as it might have grave effects on your business. Therefore, if something fails, there should be a copy of your important business data that you can work with.
Virtual And Horizontal Scaling
If you want to add additional server resources to your website, you must plan it accordingly. You can scale your website hosting resources vertically or horizontally. Vertical scaling means that you add more resources or more hard drives to your already existing server, or you opt for a larger server. Horizontal scaling means you add more nodes or another server. If you would like to opt for horizontal scaling, you must plan it in advance.
Website Speed
As there is an increase in the amount of data on your website, there is always a threat of slow website speed. Generally, users search for tiny bits of data from the large database of your website and it takes time to serve that information, this results in a slow website. In dealing with large data the I/O (Input/Output) disk reading might become slow; therefore, you need a faster memory access system. The solution lies in hosting on an efficient web server that has the capacity of handling your website data.
Conclusion:
A lot of planning goes into creating a scalable website. Having an efficient hosting server that perfectly manages your website load will help in handling the traffic spikes on your websites. Having a scalable website is a great way to ensure a great user experience for your website visitors.
