Interviewing for a web architect position? You’ll need to master these 30 common web architect interview questions
As a web architect, you are responsible for planning, designing, and overseeing the development of websites and web applications. This complex and demanding role requires strong technical knowledge, problem-solving abilities, and communication skills.
To land a web architect job, you need to ace the interview by demonstrating your qualifications. Employers will ask a mix of technical, behavioral, and situational questions to assess your skills.
I’ve compiled this list of 30 of the most common web architect interview questions so you can prepare winning answers. Master these questions, and you’ll be ready to shine in your next interview.
Technical Web Architect Interview Questions
Technical questions test your knowledge of web architecture principles, programming languages, frameworks, and tools. Brush up on these key areas before your interview.
1. What is the difference between a web architect and a web developer?
Web architects design the overall structure, layout, and features of a website or web application They plan and sketch site maps, wireframes, and prototypes
Web developers build the site based on the architect’s plans by writing code in languages like HTML CSS JavaScript, and PHP. The architect provides the vision and specifications; the developer makes it a reality.
2. What is HTTP session replication, and why is it used?
HTTP session replication copies and synchronizes a website user’s session data across multiple servers in a cluster. It ensures the user can continue their session even if one of the servers fails, providing failover and zero downtime. Session replication is vital for reliability and uptime.
3. How does CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) work?
CORS allows web resources to make cross-domain requests to domains outside their origin. It defines a way for the browser and server to interact to determine if cross-origin requests should be allowed or blocked for security reasons. CORS headers like Access-Control-Allow-Origin facilitate this communication.
4. What is a cluster, and why is clustering used?
A cluster is a group of networked servers running in parallel to increase performance, availability, and redundancy. Clustering distributes workloads across servers so if one fails, the application continues running on the rest. This minimizes downtime and maximizes scalability.
5. What are the ACID properties required for web database transactions?
ACID stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. Transactions must adhere to these properties:
- Atomicity – Each transaction succeeds or fails as a single unit
- Consistency – The database remains in a consistent state after a transaction
- Isolation – Transactions operate independently without interference
- Durability – Completed transactions persist even after system failure
6. What is the single responsibility principle, and how is it used in web architecture?
The single responsibility principle states that classes should only have one reason to change – they should only handle one specific job. Adhering to this principle produces modular, reusable code with high cohesion and loose coupling. It makes applications easier to maintain and extend over time.
7. What are some differences between a binary semaphore and mutex?
A mutex allows only one thread to access a resource at a time, enforcing mutual exclusion. A binary semaphore can be signaled by any thread, not just the owner. Also, a blocked thread will busy-wait on a mutex but sleep on a semaphore. Semaphores are useful for synchronizing threads while mutexes are for protecting critical sections.
8. What does SOLID stand for in object-oriented programming?
SOLID is an acronym for five object-oriented design principles:
- Single responsibility
- Open/closed
- Liskov substitution
- Interface segregation
- Dependency inversion
These principles help build flexible, maintainable systems with clean code and minimal coupling between components.
9. What is scalability in web architecture?
Scalability is the ability of a system to handle increased load by making use of additional resources. A scalable website can maintain performance by adding web servers, database servers, memory, bandwidth, etc. There are two main ways to scale: scale up vertically or scale out horizontally.
10. What is latency and why does it matter for web applications?
Latency is the delay between a user request and system response. Low latency provides a smooth, responsive user experience. High latency results in lag, freezing, timeouts, and frustration. Web architects must optimize latency by choosing technologies and hosting strategies that maximize performance.
Behavioral Web Architect Interview Questions
Behavioral questions evaluate your people skills, attitude, and professional traits. Use the STAR method to provide detailed examples that showcase your abilities.
11. Tell me about a time you successfully adapted an existing system to meet new requirements.
- Situation: Our company launched a new product that doubled website traffic overnight.
- Task: I had to modify the site architecture to handle the spike in load.
- Action: I horizontally scaled the web and database servers and optimized bottlenecks.
- Result: The upgrades provided ample capacity without any downtime or user impact.
12. Describe a complex web architecture challenge you faced. How did you approach and resolve it?
- Situation: A client wanted to integrate their legacy system with a new, modern e-commerce platform.
- Task: I needed to design an integration approach that connected these disparate systems.
- Action: I researched integration patterns like REST APIs and message queues to find the right solution. I proposed an API gateway pattern that met all the requirements.
- Result: The client was thrilled with the end product, which seamlessly bridged their old and new systems.
13. Tell me about a time you had to explain a technical web architecture concept to a non-technical person or client. How did you handle it?
- Situation: I was presenting a new database sharding design to senior managers.
- Task: I had to explain the technical details clearly to non-technical leadership.
- Action: I used analogies like dividing a pile of sand into smaller piles to distribute load. I provided simple diagrams and avoided jargon.
- Result: The executives understood and approved the design thanks to my clear, relatable explanation.
14. Describe a time you made a mistake on an architectural design. What lessons did you learn?
- Situation: I undersized a web server cluster, causing slow response times under peak loads.
- Task: I needed to quickly resolve the performance issues.
- Action: I doubled the number of web servers and load balanced traffic. I also adjusted thresholds to auto-scale capacity up and down.
- Result: Response times improved significantly. I learned to design in a buffer for growth and leverage auto-scaling.
15. How do you stay current on the latest web technologies and trends?
- I subscribe to industry publications, blogs, and newsletters like Smashing Magazine.
- I participate in web architecture and development forums to exchange ideas.
- I attend webinars and conferences like RedisConf and Velocity.
- I experiment with new languages and frameworks in my personal projects.
- I built strong relationships with mentors who advise me on emerging technologies.
Scenario-Based Web Architect Interview Questions
Scenario questions present a hypothetical situation and ask what you would do. They test your thinking on your feet and decision-making abilities.
16. If you could go back in time before starting a project, what process or design changes would you make?
Looking back on past projects, there are a few improvements I would incorporate from the very beginning:
- Set up version control with Git for easier collaboration and feature branching.
- Implement unit tests and continuous integration to catch bugs early.
- Containerize applications with Docker for more consistent deployments.
- Use a cloud platform like AWS instead of traditional hosting for auto-scaling.
- Design a REST API from the start for flexible integration.
17. How would you improve the performance of an existing public-facing website that is slowing under peak traffic loads?
To optimize website performance, I would:
- Profile the application to identify bottlenecks.
- Caching frequently accessed data to reduce database load.
- Enable compression to minimize page asset size.
- Implement a CDN to cache static content closer to users.
- Horizontally scale web and database servers to share traffic.
- Switch to an auto-scaling serverless architecture.
- Upgrade to a real-time monitoring tool like New Relic.
18. You are building an e-commerce site projected to grow rapidly. How would you architect it for high scalability?
For maximum scalability, I would:
- Build stateless components that can scale independently.
- Create a microservices architecture for isolated scaling.
- Offload static assets to a CDN.
- Leverage a managed cloud platform like AWS for auto-scaling.
- Distribute SQL databases using sharding.
- Index databases appropriately and optimize queries.
- Implement message queues
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What is CORS? How does it work?
Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that allows many resources (e.g., fonts, JavaScript, etc.) on a web page to be requested from another domain outside the domain from which the resource originated. It’s a mechanism supported in HTML5 that manages XMLHttpRequest access to a domain different.
CORS adds new HTTP headers that provide access to permitted origin domains. For HTTP methods other than GET (or POST with some MIME types), the specification says that browsers must first use an HTTP OPTIONS request header to ask the server for a list of supported methods. The actual request can then be submitted. Servers can also notify clients whether “credentials” (including Cookies and HTTP Authentication data) should be sent with requests. 2 .
Explain the purpose of each of the HTTP request types when used with a RESTful web service.
When used with a RESTful web service, each of the HTTP request types is used for the following:
- GET: Gets information from the server; it should only get information and not do anything else.
- POST: Sends data to the server for a new entity. It is often used to send a completed web form or upload a file.
- PUT is like POST, but it’s used to replace an existing entity.
- PATCH is like PUT, but it’s used to change only certain fields in an existing entity.
- DELETE: Removes data from the server.
- When a request is sent, TRACE lets you see what each machine on the network path gets. As such, it simply returns what was sent.
- Options: This lets a client ask for information about the request methods a service supports. Allow is the response header that matters, and it just lists the methods that are supported. It can also be used to find out what kinds of requests the server where the service is located can handle by adding a * to the URI. ).
- HEAD is the same as GET for a resource, but it only sends back the response headers. e. , with no entity-body).
- CONNECT: This method is mostly used to connect to a resource over the network, usually through a proxy that can be asked to forward an HTTP request as TCP and keep the connection going. It sends a 200 status code and a message that says “Connection Established” once the connection is made.
3 .
Describe the key advantages of HTTP/2 as compared with HTTP 1.1.
HTTP/2 provides decreased latency to improve page load speed by supporting:
- Data compression of HTTP headers
- Server push technologies
- Page elements can be loaded at the same time over a single TCP connection.
- Prioritization of requests
An important operational benefit of HTTP/2 is that it avoids the head-of-line blocking problem in HTTP 1.
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Explain the basic structure of a MIME multipart message when used to transfer different content type parts. Provide a simple example.
A simple example of a MIME multipart message is as follows:
Each MIME message starts with a message header. This header contains information about the message content and boundary. Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=frontier tells us that the message is made up of several parts, each with a different content type and a –frontier as their boundary.
Each part consists of its own content header (zero or more Content- header fields) and a body. Multipart content can be nested. To keep things simple, a multipart type’s content-transfer-encoding can only be 7bit, 8bit, or binary. Using different levels of decoding would be too hard to handle. As a whole, the multipart block doesn’t have a charset. The Encoded-Word system handles non-ASCII characters in the part headers, and charsets can be set for the part bodies if it makes sense for their content type. 5 .
What is long polling, how does it work, and why would you use it? What is the biggest problem with long polling in terms of server and client resources? What is the best HTML5 feature that can be used instead of long polling?
HTTP is based on a pattern of requests and responses. This means that the server can’t send data to the client (i.e. e. , the server can only provide data to the client in response to a client request). Long polling is a web application development pattern used to emulate pushing data from server to client. The client sends a request to the server using the long polling pattern. The connection stays open until the server is ready to send data to the client. The connection is closed only after data is sent back to the client or connection timeout occurs. The client then creates a new request when the connection is closed, thus restarting the loop.
There are two important drawbacks that need to be considered when using long polling:
- There is no difference between long polling requests and other HTTP requests, so web servers handle them the same way. This means that each long poll connection will take up server resources, which could mean that the server can only handle a certain number of connections at a time. This can lead to HTTP connection timeouts.
- Each web browser has a limit on how many connections a web app can make at once. This means that your app may take longer to load and work less well.
In HTML5, a useful alternative to long polling is using a WebSocket. A WebSocket is a protocol providing full-duplex communications channels over a single TCP connection. The WebSocket protocol lets a browser and a website talk to each other more, which allows for live content and gets rid of the need for long polling.
Another potential answer could be Server-sent DOM Events. Which is method of continuously sending data from a server to the browser, rather than repeatedly requesting it. However, this HTML5 feature is not supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer, thus making it less attractive solution. 6 .
Consider the following JavaScript code that is executed in a browser:
If executeAjaxCallAsync() uses a standard XmlHttpRequest to get data from the server asynchronously, how many HTTP requests do you think this loop will make at the same time?
Number of concurrent HTTP requests and XmlHttpRequest is limited in all browsers. Specific limitations are different depending on browser type and version.
For example, according to Mozilla Developer Network Firefox 3 limits the number of XMLHttpRequest connections per server to 6 (previous versions limit this to 2 per server).
After thinking about this, the browser would run this loop in chunks so that the number of HTTP requests it creates at the same time would never be more than 6. 7 .
What is an ETag and how does it work?
An ETag is a unique number that a web server gives to a certain version of a resource that can be found at a URL. If the resource content at that URL ever changes, a new and different ETag is assigned.
When a URL is requested, the web server usually sends back the resource along with its ETag value. This value is stored in an HTTP “ETag” field:
The client may then decide to cache the resource, along with its ETag. The client will send its saved copy of the ETag along with the request in an “If-None-Match” field the next time it wants to get the same URL.
When the client makes a new request, the server may now check the ETag against the ETag for the most recent version of the resource. The server may send back a very short response with an HTTP 304 Not Modified status if the ETag values match. This means that the resource has not changed. The client knows that its cached version is still good when it sees the 304 status. It should use that version.
The resource has probably changed, though, if the ETag values don’t match. A full response with the resource’s content is sent back, just like if ETag weren’t being used. If this happens, the client may choose to replace the version it had cached with the new resource and ETag. 8 .
Explain the difference between stateless and stateful protocols. Which type of protocol is HTTP? Explain your answer.
A stateless communications protocol treats each request as an independent transaction. Because of this, the server doesn’t have to keep any session, identity, or status information for multiple requests from the same source. Similarly, the requestor can not rely on any such information being retained by the responder.
A stateful communications protocol, on the other hand, keeps “state” information like session data, identity, status, etc., on the responding party. ) across multiple requests from the same source.
HTTP is a stateless protocol. HTTP doesn’t require servers to keep track of information or status about each user for as long as the requests last.
Some web servers implement states using different methods (using cookies, custom headers, hidden form fields etc. ). Though, HTTP is what all web applications depend on at their core. HTTP is still a stateless protocol based on the simple request/response paradigm. 9 .
In your words, what is a “MIME type,” what does it contain, and what is it used for?
MIME is an acronym for Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions. It is used as a standard way of classifying file types over the Internet.
Web servers and browsers both have a list of MIME types that make it easy to send files of a known type to other computers or browsers.
There are two parts to a MIME type: a type and a subtype. A slash (/) separates them. For example, the MIME type for Microsoft Word files is application/msword (i. e. , type is application and the subtype is msword). 10 .
What’s the difference between GET and POST?
Both are methods used in HTTP requests. Generally it is said that GET is to download data and PUT is to upload data. But we can do both downloading as well as uploading either by GET/POST.
- When we send parameters to the server in a GET request, those parameters will show up in the URL because parameters are added to the end of the URL in GET. So there isn’t enough security when you upload to the server.
- Due to the URL’s maximum size, we can only send a certain amount of data in a GET request. We also can’t add a long data string to the URL.
- The parameters we send in the body of a request when we use POST are It’s a lot safer to send data which has been encrypted in the body of an HTTP request.
- We can send a lot more data using POST.
Note: GET is faster when we only need to get data from a static API call and don’t need to pass any parameters.
There is more to interviewing than tricky technical questions, so these are intended merely as a guide. Not every good candidate for the job will be able to answer all of them, and answering all of them doesn’t mean they are a good candidate. At the end of the day, hiring remains an art, a science — and a lot of work.
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