As a technical consultant, I hear the phrase “scalable website” daily. This is because I help build software for global companies whose goal is always to find ways to grow. With 5.56 billion internet users worldwide, it’s critical to design your website or web application to respond to updated traffic demands.
In the mid-2010s, we saw a major shift from monolithic to microservices architecture thanks to internet services like Netflix and Amazon. With the rise of these types of services appealing to thousands of users globally, companies had to scale applications to meet the demands (more on these architectures later!).
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Here’s my main point: To ensure your website or web application functions smoothly at all times, it must be built to scale.
In this post, I’ll explain website scalability, its benefits, and the components of a scalable application.
Table of Contents
- What is a scalable website?
- What is website scalability?
- Benefits of Website Scalability
- Components of a Scalable Website
- Build to Scale
What is website scalability?
Here’s an analogy I like to use to explain how to build a scalable website and why website scalability is important.
Think about the holiday season at the end of the year — you always see brands like Target, Victoria’s Secret, and Walmart, hiring seasonal employees. With more customers shopping for merchandise during this time, the company has to increase its staff to handle the demand. But once the holiday rush is over, those seasonal employees are no longer needed and their position ends.
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This is exactly how a scalable website or application works: when a website or application’s traffic surges or declines, it has the ability to increase or decrease its resources with minimal effort to preserve optimal performance and functionality.
In the same way that a company needs to increase its workforce during seasonal highs, a website or application expecting growth should be built to be scalable.
Above, I mentioned monolithic and microservices, so let’s explore that topic as it relates to website scalability.
Monolithic and microservices are the main architectures we hear about in the software world. I like to compare the two as independent and dependent.
- A monolithic architecture is a software design where an application is built as a single, unified unit. All components, like the user interface, business logic, and database, are tightly coupled and deployed together as one large application.
- A microservices architecture is a software design built on the modular principle where an application is structured as a collection of small, independent services. Each service performs a specific business function, communicates through well-defined APIs, and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.
There are two types of scales: horizontal and vertical.
- Vertical scaling (scaling up). This involves increasing the power of a single machine by adding more resources like CPU, RAM, or storage.
- Horizontal scaling (scaling out). This involves increasing capacity by adding more servers to your system and distributing the workload across them.
Pro tip: I always recommend that clients who anticipate significant growth build their applications following a microservices architecture, allowing them to scale their system horizontally as needed.
What is a scalable website?
A scalable website is a website that can handle demand. The website’s user experience or performance is not impacted by traffic surges or more data processing because it can adapt quickly to these changes.
Real-World Example of Website Scalability: Ticketmaster
I am a huge Beyonce fan, and I found myself in the middle of the ticket-buying frenzy for the Cowboy Carter tour. So, I’ll use Ticketmaster as an example of how a scalable website works.
Ticketmaster's website most likely uses a microservices architecture to handle high traffic demands efficiently. (I say “most likely” because I do not have access to their system to know for sure.) They can use load balancers to distribute incoming traffic across numerous servers, preventing any single server from becoming overwhelmed.
Additionally, they can leverage content delivery networks (CDNs) to cache static content like images, placing them geographically closer to users, which reduces the load on their original servers.
When I jumped into the queue for Beyonce’s Houston show, I was number 68,233. That is a huge number of users at one time for any system.
However, the Ticketmaster databases are likely optimized to manage this huge volume of transactions, potentially using techniques like replication or sharding to distribute the database load. (Replication creates duplicate databases to prevent the original one from overloading, and sharding breaks the database into smaller, more manageable ones.)
Ticketmaster likely also uses web services for individual services like ticket search, payment processing, and user accounts to scale independently based on demand. For instance, if the ticket search service experiences a surge, only that service receives additional resources.
They also probably rely on cloud infrastructure, using platforms like AWS or Azure to enable them to scale their infrastructure horizontally and dynamically by adding more servers and resources during peak periods.
Because of these scalability measures — even during periods of intense ticket sales — the website maintains relative responsiveness, enabling users to purchase tickets with minimal delays or crashes.
Without this scalable design, the website would likely crash under overload, resulting in significant financial losses and angry fans. In other words, a scalable website is crucial.
Benefits of Website Scalability
Maintaining a reliable website or web application with continuous availability is very important — particularly for customer-facing applications like ecommerce stores or online service platforms. In this section, I’ll explain the key benefits of having a scalable website or web application. Keeping that Ticketmaster example in mind will help!
Maintains Good User Experience and Website Performance
A scalable website:
- Maintains fast loading times and responsiveness during high traffic demands.
- Reduces bounce rates, which is critical, being that 70% of consumers report that a page load time affects their willingness to buy.
- Prevents user frustration and abandonment due to slow performance.
Prevents Revenue Loss and Supports Business Growth
A scalable website:
- Enables businesses to capitalize on opportunities like flash sales and promotions.
- Handles increased traffic and transactions through horizontal scaling, leading to more sales and a larger customer base.
- Prevents lost revenue due to website crashes during high-traffic moments.
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Improves Reliability and Decreases Downtime
A scalable website:
- Reduces the risk of single points of failure through distributed workloads.
- Minimizes downtime, which has been reported to cost large enterprises as much as $9,000 dollars per minute.
- Builds trust with users and strengthens brand reputation.
- Allows the website to withstand unexpected traffic spikes and technical glitches.
Enhances Flexibility and Adaptability
A scalable website:
- Allows quick adjustment of resources to accommodate fluctuations in demand.
- Allows businesses to leverage cloud-based scalability.
- Handles adaptability to changing business needs.
- Allows for cost-effective scaling up and down of resources.
Components of a Scalable Website
Building a website or app that can handle many, many users is about more than just one thing: it's about building a entire system with different parts that work well together. These parts help spread the work around, make the site run faster, and keep it working even when things get busy.
Knowing about these basic parts can help you build a website that can grow and keep your users happy.
In this section, I’ll discuss the main components that make a website or application scalable.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is an important component for scalable websites, especially those serving a global audience. It comprises a network of geographically distributed servers that cache static content, including images, videos, and stylesheets.
By serving content from servers located geographically closer to the user, CDNs significantly reduce latency and improve page load times. I think that CDNs are indispensable for websites aiming for a worldwide reach because the content can be delivered much faster.
Load Balancing
Load balancing is an important component of scalable web architecture. It functions by distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers, and it’s the first stop for traffic before it hits your web servers.
This traffic distribution is critical for preventing any single server from becoming overloaded, thereby decreasing the chances of performance bottlenecks and minimizing the risk of downtime. To achieve this, load balancers are able to monitor server health/capacity and route requests accordingly.
Throughout my work, I’ve observed firsthand how critical this process is — especially when dealing with sudden traffic surges. Without effective load balancing, websites are at risk of becoming unresponsive or crashing entirely.
Caching
Caching is a technique that involves storing frequently accessed data in a temporary, high-speed storage location, such as a CDN or an in-memory cache. I like to think of caching as basically creating shortcuts to have frequently used tools handy, rather than having to search for them every single time they're needed.
Using this technique reduces the need to repeatedly fetch data from the primary database, resulting in faster page load times and a decreased load on the server.
Pro tip: Personally, Redis is my go-to caching tool, but there are others out there that are just as helpful such as Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, etc.
Horizontal Scaling
Horizontal scaling — also known as “scaling out” — involves increasing the capacity of a system by adding more servers. This technique allows a website to manage high-demand of traffic and transactions by distributing the workload across resources or web services.
I've personally witnessed this process within cloud computing platforms where adding additional server instances is often a straightforward procedure.
Horizontal scaling is just like my seasonal hiring example above. Just as I’m expanding my resources by hiring more people to handle an increased workload, I’m adding more servers to manage increased website traffic.
Database Optimization
Database optimization focuses on improving the performance of the database that stores a website's data. This involves using a range of techniques, including indexing to accelerate data retrieval, caching to store frequently accessed data in memory, sharding to divide the database into smaller, more manageable segments, and replication to create redundant copies of the database.
Pro tip: I‘ve observed how inefficient database queries can severely hinder a website’s overall performance, so knowing optimization strategies is important to me.
Microservices Architecture
Microservices function much like a team of specialists where each member is focused on a specific task. This division of labor makes the overall efficiency in website development and maintenance a breeze.
A microservices architecture consists of structuring a website as a collection of smaller, independent services that interact with each other via APIs. I like how this approach allows each service to be developed, deployed, and scaled independently, providing significant flexibility.
Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud infrastructure fundamentally provides websites and applications with on-demand access to various computing resources, servers, storage, and networking.
This accessibility enables websites to seamlessly scale their infrastructure — whether up or down — in response to fluctuating demands, all while eliminating the need for substantial upfront investments in physical hardware.
In my opinion, cloud computing has become the very foundation on which modern, scalable websites are built.
Pro tip: AWS is my favorite cloud provider, but there are others you can choose from, such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Build to Scale
Building a scalable website is like throwing the best party ever — I want to make sure everyone can get in, have a great time, and that the snacks (or data) keep flowing. By understanding and implementing these key components, I’m not just building a website: I’m crafting an experience that can grow, adapt, and handle whatever the internet throws at it. Now go forth and build something amazing that can handle all the Beyhive-level traffic you can dream of!
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