Following yesterday's budget announcement, we thought it would be interesting to look at how GOV.UK performed on the day compared with budget day last year.
Visits were up by nearly 40%:
2013: 1,535,222 2014: 2,127,341
Part of this increase could be because the web as a whole is growing, and GOV.UK is bigger. But, we think we can attribute some of the rise to an increase in social presence, our work with different departments, and improvements to the way the budget information is presented.
The budget is a big, complicated piece of work, and involves many people across government. Putting together sensitive data in a way that makes it accessible and understandable is much more difficult than it looks. Here at GDS we really appreciate all the hard work that goes into making the budget happen.
We had on average 1,477 visits per minute yesterday, compared with 1,066 visits per minute on budget day last year.
I'll leave it up to you to work out when the Chancellor started and finished speaking ...
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2 comments
Comment by Stephen Edwards posted on
Fascinating figures and great to see the pattern of traffic during the day. Can you explain a little more about how you measured the increase in traffic compared to 2013? For Budget 2013 the HMRC budget content was still being published on the HMRC website and was not published on GOV.UK, was this included in the figures before/after? Also, I have a recollection that the Budget 2013 content from HMT was transitioned to GOV.UK after the Budget happened (appears to be confirmed by https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/04/25/welcome-dfe-and-hmt-to-govuk/), so the Budget 2013 topical event page may have been created retrospectively. Was the traffic for Budget 2013 from the HMT site included in this analysis?
Comment by Carrie Barclay posted on
The comparison is all traffic to GOV.UK as a whole on 20 March 2013 and 19 March 2014. As I mentioned in the post, we weren't able to do direct page-to-page comparisons and, you're right, the budget information was held elsewhere and then put on GOV.Uk retrospectively last year (although in 2013 a news story was published for the 20 March budget pointing users to the HMT and HMRC sites for budget coverage).
Next year we will be able to draw more concrete conclusions because we will be able to make direct page comparisons. For now, we know that traffic has increased since last year, but we can't say how much of that is directly related to having the budget information available on a single topic page on GOV.UK.