Developers and platform vendors love to talk about building websites that "scale." Scaling is good; scaling is necessary; everyone wants to scale! But what does it even mean?
Here's how I think about scaling in the context of websites:
Reach: Scaling means bigger audiences
Obviously, one way websites (and businesses) scale is to grow bigger — to go from a small local customer base to a bigger one, then to regional, national, and perhaps eventually global. Serving a big audience is challenging, even if your business is 100% digital, because different people need different things, but all of them expect a great experience.
Serving a big audience well has a lot to do with technical scaling — making sure your website's publishing and deployment setup will hold up when thousands or millions of users are looking for your content — but it also requires you to think about who all these users are, and what you expect them to do on your site.
Are they buying products or services? Watching video or other rich content? When you're serving lots of people, it gets harder to generalize about what they want, but also necessary to generalize unless you have a huge team that can cover lots of ground, so scaling bigger means deep thinking about how to serve the largest possible audience well with the least effort from your team.
Performance: Scale means fast
Everyone — site owners and users alike — wants websites to be fast. But at scale they need to be fast, because a slow page load or transaction could be the difference between a good quarter and a not-so-good one, and serving tons of users tends to slow websites down. A lot.
In at least one respect, performance and reach go hand in hand: the easiest way to ensure speedy content delivery to a global or national audience is to leverage tech like CDNs and edge functions to place your content and software physically closer to your users, eliminating long network trips that can add microseconds to each request.
Depending on your content and services, the cost of this kind of geographically distributed hosting can cost thousands of dollars a month, or it can be nearly free. Sometimes the difference between those pricing extremes is whether your website and other systems have been set up in a way that mixes and matches different platforms, so you use the best, most cost-effective tool for each job.
Collaboration: Scale means bigger teams
A lot of websites can go from hundreds to thousands or even millions of visitors without a single problem, but break in troublesome ways when the responsibility for the site expands from one person to a whole team.
Many website building tools are simply not built for smooth collaboration, and what's more, modern web-based apps like Figma, Notion, and (of course) Google Docs have massively changed our expectations for how collaboration software ought to work.
In many marketing orgs, it's easy for everyone — writers, designers, producers, stakeholders — to jam on a single Google Doc in real time, only for the CMS to lock editing and publishing to just one user at a time. Need to fix a typo or apply an edit from the VP? Sorry — Jono's in the page doing something else, so it has to wait.
As teams grow, their publishing platforms need the flexibility to allow different people to get work done on their websites with as little waiting or handoff as possible. This includes tossing stuff back and forth over a wall to your development team, ensuring that content and assets can get to users immediately without keeping devs on standby to apply changes or hit deploy.
Change: Scale means adaptation
Most people think about scale in terms of size — how big or small something is right now, or how big it might become in the future.
But between right now and some bright future where your audience is millions of people around the world are myriad states in between, where you've scaled just a bit bigger than the day before, but you don't have time or resources to build systems to handle how big you might scale tomorrow.
And if I've learned anything from working in some of the world's biggest tech companies, it's that 90% of scaling is handling those messy middle states. There are almost no websites or web apps operating at such a big scale that there isn't a team somewhere constantly watching and planning so that things keep running smoothly from one day to the next. And if this is true for Google or Stripe, it's even more true for startups and even small enterprises.
Planning to scale means planning to flex
Getting big, getting fast, becoming collaborative — what all of these challenges have in common is the need to adapt from one way of doing things to the next, with no guarantees that any of these states are final.
The trick to building websites that scale is to build sites that are adaptable enough to get the job done under whatever conditions your business is facing today, with whatever resources you have at hand.
If you need some help figuring out what that looks like in practice, good news — that's what we do here at Bits&Letters. Get in touch or grab some time on my calendar, so we can start figuring out what your website needs to scale both today and tomorrow.
