Having a clean code is imperative: We cannot emphasize this enough. Though it is an obvious thing, many developers often don’t pay much attention to writing clean code as it looks like pretty manageable at the initial stage. As you progress forward with your web app’s coding, you will start to notice it becoming a big ball of mud that will be full of spaghetti code. Only then you will realize how hard it will be to maintain and scale it. So always make sure to keep your code as clean as you can.
Leverage the 12factor: No matter how great you are at web application development, everyone needs a bit of guidance. This is where 12factor comes in. It has best practices that you can follow to make sure your app can effectively scale up when it is time. As someone once said: “it won’t scale if it’s not designed to scale.” So, keep this in mind and make sure to implement these 12 practices if you want to develop a scalable web application.
Carefully handle your database: As you scale up, more and more transactions per seconds will be done as more clients will use your web application. This is the time when you need to make sure that your database is big enough to store and retrieve information for everyone who uses it. Just choose a proper DB engine, design the best possible schema and you will be good to go.
Choose scalability supportive hosting: You don’t want your web application to go down when the traffic of users increases. To make sure your web application keeps thriving even at the most rush hours, you need to select a proper server configuration and infrastructure that supports scalability. For instance, Amazon EC2 has the auto-scaling feature that developers can leverage when scaling.
Relieve your backend: Move some of the code to front-end if you get a chance. This will make your backend less overloaded when the users do more and more computations as you are scaling up.
Test, monitor and optimize: You need to constantly monitor your codebase and identify the problems as soon as they arise, so you don’t have to go under hours or days of maintenance that can deprive your users of using your web application. Furthermore, you need to utilize some optimization tools to not only solve the problems in the code but also optimize it for minimal bottlenecks in your web app.