We throw the term scalable code or scalable website around a lot around here. It can be somewhat confusing as to what it is and why you need it so let’s take a moment to look into it with some examples.

Our Nashville web design team has been building websites for over 15 years at this point. We support and maintain the websites we build. Since most of the companies we work with are in a growth stage, those websites change and evolve over time. Sometimes the business itself is changing, so the changes could be key functionality changes. 

When the website needs to do something different functionally, you’re either going to add code, change code, or you may need to rewrite code completely. Where possible, it’s ideal to add or to change code rather than rewriting it. When you rewrite code you have to test everything that was working before or maybe everything altogether to ensure your changes didn’t break other functionality. Our Nashville web design company runs a test suite for this reason. But it adds cost to our customer and takes our team time to keep up with and manage.

So what is writing scalable code?

Scalable code is the idea the website functionality can grow and change without having to rewrite the website entirely. It is the idea that our customer would save money because we would discuss and consider the business case when we are writing the code. When we write code we want to do it in a way that won’t need to be redone again in the future.

WordPress can back an unskilled developer into a corner pretty quickly because the content management system uses the functional code programming instead of of object oriented programming. 

The upside of functional programming is that it is easy for a designer or developer without large application experience to jump in and write code that makes things happen. WordPress has many forums where you can find code snippets to copy and paste to achieve what you want. Even Stack Overflow has a section dedicated to WordPress. Frameworks like Magento 2, Laravel, and Symfony have dedicated forums but the ability to copy and paste code is far more limited.

One downside of WordPress and copy and pasting code is that it can result in spaghetti code and technical debt. Spaghetti code is what happens when multiple developers grab code snippets and use them without regard to the rest of the project. It creates technical debt by expediting the delivery of the project and creating something that someone else will have to rewrite down the road.

Another example of a scalable website occurs when you consider the business case.  For instance, let’s take a business who wants their website to sell one product to a customer who has signed up and taken a few actions on the site. 

If the signup process is required up front, the customer’s dashboard is highly custom, and the specific actions we mentioned are not normal website behavior it may not be obvious to choose an off-the-shelf tool like WooCommerce to handle the order process. To make the website scalable we need to consider the business goals. 

Questions like these will help us determine how to write the application so we don’t back our customer into a corner: could there be more products, might there be categorization, could the up-front signup be elementated, what does the backend of the order process look like, can the administrators edit everything they need and add or take away products as desire?

Our Nashville web design development team really works around this to write scalable code. 

Making a website scalable doesn’t happen easily. When you are dealing with custom websites, it requires experience in building the sites, experience dealing with business cases, knowing what could happen based on past experiences or employment in large companies, understanding the business owner’s goals, and a lot of experience writing code and speaking developer language.

What happens if you don’t have scalable code and you need changes to your website?

Our Nashville web design company specializes in supporting and maintaining websites. We have long lasting relationships with our team and clients to reduce turnover and cost associated with it. Additionally, we write test suites full of test cases to document the various functionality within the website. If a particular piece of functionality is complex we write a feature document to illustrate how it works and what it looks like so our developers and quality assurance team can quickly understand it.

If a business needs something new on their website it may need to be audited to understand the quality of code and how it works. Before making any major changes, we need to discuss the business requirements and future goals with the team. Rewriting a website isn’t the first step our Nashville web design team wants to take but sometimes it is inevitable. The key is to make sure that the rewrite does not put you in the same position down the road if you are only making small changes to your business or website.

The best way to ensure your business ends up with a great website that isn’t going to cost you a fortune to maintain is to use a great development company from the beginning. Working with a designer who understands marketing is key to your success but making sure the website is built to be able to scale is key to your cost and cashflow. Our Nashville web design company has over 15 years of experience building websites for companies making over one million dollars per year and has seen what it takes to grow to over 50 million. Using our experience we will guide you through the process of building your website to help grow your business and make you successful online.

To get your audit or get started building your website just click the schedule a free consultation button on our site. We’ll give you a free hour to talk through your website and discuss your goals. If we can help we will start with an audit if needed or simply dive into your project to help you get the growth you’re looking for.