At the beginning of the 21st century, many companies began creating their own websites, recognizing that a digital presence is essential for operating in the market. This first generation of sites certainly transformed the world, but started facing a plethora of challenges by the 2010s. Created in the early days of website development, these projects often employed outdated architectures, making support and redesign a challenging task for their owners. 20 years later, our understanding of website design and optimal technologies for this task has evolved tremendously. What seemed possible only in science fiction is now technologically feasible. In this article, we want to discuss how to create a website that will grow with your business, being capable of almost infinite scaling after the end of the initial development cycle.
Rule 1. Use Modern Scaling-Friendly Technologies
The first step towards creating a website that will be capable of scaling infinitely with your business, without any need for long-term redesign, is choosing the right technology. The early Internet was based on programming and scripting languages that had to be developed almost in real time, together with the rest of the Internet. Today, technologies like JavaScript, Node.js, Bubble, or Webflow already have the majority of functions necessary for creating a successful website. They are a product of many years of experience, integrating frontend and backend features that had to be discovered empirically during the early days of the Internet.
All of the listed technologies do several important things for you to enable long-term scaling. Firstly, they have many internal optimizations that speed up sites, improving user experience without any need for outside intervention. You get those benefits just by using the newest versions of those technologies. Secondly, they already offer access to the most important modules necessary for creating a modern website. Bubble and Webflow provide a large number of modules for integrating maps, social media, questionnaires, and various forms. For example, top Webflow experts can create sites capable of adapting to very dynamic markets because this technology (as well as Bubble) integrates GUI-based site creation and easy-to-expand hosting, removing or automating most backend tasks.
Node.js and JavaScript require manual development, but have access to a gigantic database of user-created addons. NPM (Node.js Package Manager) is currently among the largest repositories of software for developers. It offers access to millions of user-created packages that can help implement extremely complex designs fast.
Lastly, all those technologies are created with scaling in mind. On the one hand, they have many optimizations that allow deploying large sites to massive audiences. Node.js uses various complex CPU thread technologies to ensure stability even if a relatively small website becomes popular overnight, gaining millions of daily users. Bubble offers hosting services and constant optimizations to match the changing nature of the Internet. On the other hand, those technologies are also great for scaling because they took many of the early technological problems faced by developers into consideration. Web technologies now have many integration tools that enable them to work not only with the programming languages that are popular currently, but also to integrate technologies from the future.
Rule 2. Focus on Modern Development Strategies
While modern web development technologies genuinely solve many problems for developers, they nonetheless remain only one of the “pillars” necessary for creating a scalable site. One must also correctly apply those technologies to achieve success. So, how can one do this?
Firstly, it is very important to focus on a modular design for your site. Don’t put all eggs into one basket, tying every module to the foundational code of your website. Instead, a better approach is to clearly separate the “core” of your website that is used for running servers and databases from the frontend. This practice is standard in the software development industry, but many startups (especially the ones that function outside IT) ignore it due to time pressure or lack of expertise. Why is this so important? By separating the backend and frontend (as well as other modules within them), you will be able to quickly swap certain blocks like database management technologies without needing to refactor everything else.
Secondly, development itself must be flexible. In the earliest days of the Internet, the so-called Waterfall was the go-to strategy for most IT developers. The idea behind Waterfall is simple: a development team is allocated a budget and given a clear task to develop a certain app. After that, it proceeds according to the pre-established plans without major changes. While this is great for developing apps and sites that perform a narrow set of functions that are well-known to the person who sets development tasks, this is rarely a very good strategy for most apps because market conditions are constantly shifting. Waterfall can be great for factories that require software for their internal hardware. However, if you need a site for representing a certain company or selling products, this is very unlikely to work.
Standards for sites change all the time; even within 2 or 3 months of development, markets can fluctuate significantly. More importantly, many ideas work well on paper but tend to be quite suboptimal in reality. For this reason, it is better to go for an alternative development approach: Agile. Within this approach, sites are developed in stages. After each stage, site owners can assess progress and conclude whether they are moving in the right direction or not. This allows developers to not only deliver the modular structure we mentioned before, but also to avoid a lot of unnecessary work by correcting issues before they become too costly to remove.
Lastly, we also recommend separating site design and content from the development process itself. Platforms like Figma allow you to maintain and even test site designs without developing any code. By maintaining a high-quality design in Figma and updating it, you can be relatively independent from various platforms. Once it becomes necessary to change your backend or frontend code, it will be a matter of just reimplementing existing designs in new code.
Conclusion
To summarize, by combining all practices mentioned above, you can future-proof your website, helping it achieve both scalability and longevity. There’s also one more thing you can do while creating a lasting site: ask for expert help. Many companies like Keenethics offer site development assistance. By consulting with experts, you will be able to leverage not only theoretical but also practical expertise that can take years to accumulate if one tries to establish in-house development.
