Emma Pawling /
Marketing Delivery Manager
b4b needed to make sure that The Staff Canteen social network platform could cope with the surge in visitors on key dates running-up to and on-the-day of the 2020 TSC Awards.
Awards ceremonies are usually hosted at a glittery gala event in London. Unfortunately, with lockdown restrictions, that was not possible for the first TSC Awards. But, with the industry needing a positive lift, The Staff Canteen was determined to continue with the planned celebrations.
They moved the nominations and voting to the online platform and hosted a live awards ceremony on Facebook. Our job, back-of-house, was to make sure that the site could cope with the surge in visitors on key dates running-up to and on-the-day of the awards.
Celebrity chefs Tom Kerridge, Gordon Ramsay and others added to the spikes in website traffic with Tweets and social posts encouraging their followers to vote.
In total over 30,000 votes were cast for 170 nominees in six categories.
On the day of the awards, the website enjoyed an increase of 194% in traffic. On the day of the nominations, this figure was 558% up on a typical day. On the busiest day TSC was getting 658 visits per hour.
The good news doesn’t stop there. Traffic spikes have continued since the awards, coinciding with the MasterChef – The Professionals semi-finals and finals being broadcast on BBC One. On semi-final day, the number of sessions was up over 1000% with a surge in traffic between 8-10 pm, that’s over 54 sessions per minute.
On the day of the final, there were 18,800 sessions, nearly 2 per second. And the important thing is that the website portal was able to cope with these spikes in good news (and traffic).
Utilising the power of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) we were able to serve over 17,000 page views with an average view-time of over four minutes that represents 50 days worth of content consumed in a 24-hour period!
The Staff Canteen is the leading social network for chefs and the wider hospitality industry.
The b4b team built the bespoke website and app for The Staff Canteen and we also host and support this platform.
If you have an essential web-service like The Staff Canteen portal that needs to be robust in the face of spiking traffic, get in contact with us.
