Handling a high amount of concurrent traffic at once for a website needs a holistic approach which involves good server infrastructure, planning and continuous monitoring.

We’ve probably all seen the Internal Server Error when browsing the internet and this could mean a number of things: there’s a problem with the code, or the server could be overwhelmed. We’ll be looking at the latter in this series of blog posts and what we can do to make sure that our websites run quickly before having to spend a fortune on hosting.

In this post, I’ll be focusing on things you can do at the design stage that will help pay off later down the line.

Reusable, modular design

Reusable components are parts of your website that can be reused over and over again. Examples of these include the header and the footer of the web page.

Reusing elements means that you benefit from being able to cache certain parts of your site. For example, your website’s header may include your organisation’s logo, once this has been loaded by the user’s device, it is cached and will no longer be requested from the server. This is the same for the CSS (cascading style sheet), the code that controls the look and the feel of the website.

Example of a header
Your website’s header may include your organisation’s logo, once this has been loaded by the user’s device, it is cached and will no longer be requested from the server.

Creating modular elements in the design has other benefits, too. It makes sites easier to update and maintain. Say for example, we created a sidebar that contained links to other web pages within the site. This might be a call to action so users can get in touch and also a graphic promoting a new product or service. If we wanted to change this graphic, we could so in one place and this change would reflect in all sidebars throughout the site.

Creating modular elements in the design has other benefits, too. It makes sites easier to update and maintain.

Use of imagery

There are various different types of image formats we can use when designing a web site. All have pros and cons that you can use to your advantage to optimise your site.

A big trend at the moment is to use a large image at the top of each page. This gives a good visual impact when a user first opens the page but can slow down the experience if the image isn’t optimised correctly.

SVGs

SVGs are good for things such as logos and icons rather than photos. A big advantage of using SVG is that they are vector based. This means that the icon or logo is rendered using maths and code rather than pixel by pixel. This is great for your organisation’s logo as it means the same logo can be used throughout the site at different sizes without a loss of quality. It’ll also be good for the website’s performance: the logo will be downloaded once per user then saved on their computer.

JPGs

JPGs are good for photography that you use throughout your site but they need to be optimised properly in order to get the most benefit. You should always avoid using images at sizes larger than they need to be. Content management systems such as WordPress compress images for you and generate the relevant sized images.

PNGs

PNGs are good as they support transparency and are a good all around image format. Use PNGs for images with a lower number of colours.

GIFs

GIFs are good as they support animation but beware that file sizes can soon get large and take a while to load on mobile connections.

Fonts

There have been massive improvements in support for using fonts in web design over the last ten years. Before this, using a custom font was difficult and not very well supported. Now however, font-face allows us to use pretty much use any font we can get a license for on your website.

However, these font files can be large so try to minimise the use of these. If you’re going to use a custom font for your headers, it may be best to use a native font stack (a list of fonts that are available on devices) for your body copy.

Conversely, if you’re using a font sparingly, it might be best to consider whether you could do this another way that isn’t loading an entire font just to display a few characters. Consider using an image or an SVG instead.

Homepage carousels

Should you use a carousel on your homepage? No.

In all seriousness though, these add a lot of weight to a page with extra images, JavaScript and HTML markup. Some studies suggest that only 1% of users click these. Of those 1% of people, nearly 90% click the first slide with the other 10% on slides 2, 3, 4 and 5.

You probably shouldn’t use carousels on your website. Only 1% of users click them.

Third-party services

You may have one of the fastest websites around but if you use a lot of third party services, this can slow your site down massively and you can’t always do anything about this other than to pick which services you use wisely.

Because these usually aren’t considered at the design stage they can sneak in quickly and have a big impact on website load times.

Google Analytics can be used to track visitors, sales and form submissions but if you barely look at this data or use other tools then this is adding quite a big overhead to each page on your site.

Another similar third-party service is the Facebook Pixel. You’re encouraged to use this if you have a Facebook page and use Facebook Ads.

This tracks a lot of information about the users of your site and it is debatable whether this collects more information than it should. It is however, essential if you want to track the effectiveness of adverts you’re running on Facebook but if you’re not, maybe get rid of it to increase the speed of your pages.

Think modular and keep your fonts, images and third-party services in check

To wrap up:

  • Wherever possible, design modular elements that can be repeated throughout the site (making it easier to cache).
  • Think carefully about the best image formats to use and make sure you only make them at the size you need them.
  • You can choose from thousands of fonts, but it doesn’t mean you have to. Each new font you use on a website makes the site slower.
  • Avoid using homepage carousels. Users don’t find them useful and you’ll add unnecessary bloat to any page that has them.
  • Think carefully in the design stage what third-party services you really need.

As is always the case—keep it simple. Whilst designing a new website is a fantastic opportunity and the possibilities might be endless, it’s also perfect time to show restraint to help your website load faster in the future.

Photo of James Sheriff

James Sheriff

James is Genius Division's managing director. In his spare time, he's a keen photographer and walker. James commutes to work most days, rain or shine, on his bike and has managed to keep falling off to an acceptable minimum.

One of our clients was once on BBC’s Dragons’ Den. I’m being vague — purposefully so — and I’m releasing this article some years later, anonymised. Our client didn’t want to be part of this article, but I still think the analysis will be very useful for some digital agencies, so I’m releasing it. Our client will be referred to as The Client throughout this.

We’d been working with The Client for over a year, and we’d managed their website, designed and launched a new website (the new one that appeared on Dragons’ Den) and we’d helped them with their digital marketing and graphic design.

Our biggest challenge yet came when they appeared on Dragons’ Den. The Client did really well, and it was amazing to see. Whilst The Client was on the telly getting questioned by the Dragons, we were sat in our studio in sunny Barnsley monitoring the website.

How we prepared for the traffic

Before we even knew any results, we needed to prepare for the traffic. I started by doing what we all know best: I Googled it. I analysed how much traffic we could expect.

From the many articles online, it looked like we should have expected anything from 5,000–10,000 users to hit the website all at once. We all knew it could be a lot of traffic, so we prepared for the worst.

We knew we’d need a scalable web hosting solution: something that would allow us to expand its capacity if the web server started getting much more traffic than we expected. For that, we knew we’d need to go for a cloud hosting solution. There’s several thousand options for cloud hosting out there (the most popular being Amazon’s), but we liked how Digital Ocean worked, and settled for that.

Once we’d got the Digital Ocean solution setup, we tested it by sending lots of traffic to the site. We needed to be confident that when it came to 8pm on Sunday night, the server would hold up to the undeniable battering it was about to take.

How the website traffic was affected by the TV appearance

When it came to 8pm on Sunday, things started very calm.

The site was averaging 2–5 users at any one time, just as it had been doing for the past month.

The Client had the premier spot on Dragons’ Den, so at about 20:45, everything was nice and steady with the website.

Then at 20:47, things started change. The stats shot up from 5 to 358.

For the next 13 minutes, things went a bit mental.

We were all hands on deck at this point. The website stayed online because we had the website cached from two different places, but it was starting to get slow. We finished off at 21:02 with 2610 concurrent users. 

Yes, that’s 2610 people all using the site at the same time. It was a massive amount of traffic to the website, but we coped with a lot of preparation.

What happened next though surprised us even more.

The next 4 hours

Whilst we knew we were going to get a large influx of users to the website within a 10 minute period, we’d expected the traffic to start dying off pretty quickly. We didn’t expect the traffic to sustain for the next four hours.

For the next hour after Dragons’ Den aired, we were still getting 500 users on the website at any one time. We couldn’t believe that the traffic was continuing, and people were spending a long time on the website.

The web traffic stats for the day of Dragons’ Den

On the Sunday September 3rd 2017, the site got 78,465 page views, and 11,203 users. Our average session duration was 4 minutes, which was fantastic. People were browsing the website, considering the products, and more importantly: buying things.

Can you tell which bit of these stats correspond to when The Client was on Dragons’ Den?

The day that The Client was on Dragon’s Den.

To compare stats with a typical day on The Client’s website, Friday September 1st 2017 garnered 2,215 page views and 386 users.

With The Client being on Dragons’ Den for 10 minutes, the site’s traffic was up by over 3500%. Not a bad traffic increase for 10 minutes airtime.

As for sales, The Client’s sales were up by 4000% on the day of the appearance as well.

I was incredibly surprised by the traffic boost. I (rather foolishly) expected 7500 users on the website at once during the slot, but I was still surprised to see 2600 users all using the site at the same time. It wasn’t just that bit that surprised my though, it was the level of sustained traffic for the next four hours as well.

The surprises weren’t over yet though.

The day after Dragons’ Den (and the day after that)

On Monday, we fully expected everything to have died down and gone back to normal. We expected the boost of web traffic to be brief and brutal, and for things to quickly return to normal service. That didn’t turn out to be the case.

It appears that most people decided to come back to the The Client’s site the day after and make their purchases. 

When you think about this logically that does make sense: lots of people were trying to use the site during Dragons’ Den and would have experienced a bit of slowness due to the hammering the website was taking.

The day after people could comfortably browse the site in their own time and purchase at their own leisure.

They came back to the website in droves, and purchase leisurely they did.

Whilst sales were up by 4000% on the day of Dragons’ Den, sales were up by a whopping 5000% the day afterThe Client closed out Monday 4th September with their best sales day ever through the website.

The website received about 150–200 people on the site at any one time all day on Monday.

On the Monday September 4th 2017, the site got 51,369 page views, and 7,979 users. The traffic was quite a bit less than the day of Dragons’ Den, but the amount of sales and actions people were performing through the website were significantly higher.

We were still seeing a higher-than-average level of traffic on Tuesday too, with 24,978 page views and 4,184 users throughout the entire day. These were still converting to orders too. This graph of the last couple of days shows you the spike of the Dragons’ Den appearance, followed by the (much slower than expected) decline back to normality.

A summary of all the web traffic over Sunday, Monday and Tuesday

To remind you of the traffic over the last 3 days, here’s what we experienced:

  • On Dragons’ Den Day: Sunday September 3rd 2017, the site got 78,465 page views, and 11,203 users. Sales up by 4000%.
  • On Monday September 4th 2017, the site got 51,369 page views, and 7,979 users. Sales up by 5000%.
  • On Tuesday September 5th 2017, the site got 24,978 page views and 4,184 users. Sales up by 3000%.

As you can see, the traffic you receive during the initial slot you get on television might boost your traffic hugely, but if you have a product that you’re selling through your website, you should expect a massive increase in sales not only on the day of your appearance, but at least on the following two days as well.

We’ve seen a ripple effect throughout the rest of the marketing channels too.

Let’s talk about email marketing next.

Email marketing

  • 19 subscribers on our lead magnet before we started
  • 96 after an hour

At the last minute on Friday we had an idea. We discussed setting up a Lead Magnet with The Client: essentially giving away something free through the website in exchange for a customer (or potential customer’s) email address. It was an idea I’d been trialling with a few other websites and I’d received good conversions from it.

It was — and still is — an extremely simple lead magnet. Here’s what it looks like on the site.

Free manual
The lead magnet on The Client’s homepage. I’ve recreated this to preserve The Client’s anonymity.

Within hours of us adding this to the website, 19 people had signed up to receive their free manual. Once we saw this we knew we were onto a good idea.

After the weekend, the lead magnet now has 374 subscribers, and it’s increasing every day. It’s surpassed the amount of standard website subscribers in just 3 days.

After a week, the subscribers had doubled to way over 600.

Our standard website subscribers list has also increased massively in 3 days too, going from 66 to 235.

It’s hard to see from Mailchimp’s stats as they’re not incredibly effective, but I’d put an educated guess together and say that The Client’s total email subscriber list has increased by about a 1000 in 3 days.

A summary of the email marketing stats

I was surprised the most by how well the lead magnet performed, and still is performing. By implementing this ahead of the traffic rush from the television appearance, we’ve managed to capture hundreds more email addresses from interested buyers than we otherwise would have.

I’d like to continue increasing this over the next few months, and our first step will be to create a dedicated landing page for the lead magnet. This will allow us to effectively drive paid traffic to it to make sure it converts as well as it should, and create very specific Facebook Ads to drive the traffic.

If you currently aren’t giving away anything free on your website in exchange for an email address, consider this a very useful tactic to increase your email marketing list. 

It only needs to be a simple PDF, or a help guide, or something else small. It doesn’t have to be something difficult to put together, but it will — as our results have shown — undoubtedly increase your conversion rates on your email marketing signups.

Twitter

On the day of Dragons’ Den, Twitter generated 375 visits to the The Client’s site. On Monday, it generated 125, then Tuesday it generated 77. Despite a lot of people talking about The Client on Twitter, it didn’t send us impressive amounts of traffic to our website.

There was an impressive amount of interaction and buzz generated on the day of Dragons’ Den though. As so many people do these days, people sat and watched Dragons’ Den then started tweeting about what they were seeing. That lead to the The Client’s twitter account receiving 245 likes and 79 retweets within a couple of hours.

We also saw The Client’s Twitter follower account increase too. I’ve added Saturday into the list so you can compare.

  • Saturday: 1661
  • Sunday (Dragons’ Den Day): 1881
  • Monday: 1955
  • Tuesday: 1980
  • A total increase of 319 followers in 3 days.

A summary of the Twitter stats

Whilst 319 extra followers might not sound that impressive as a raw number, we were incredibly impressed by this. That’s a massive boost to The Client’s Twitter following, but more importantly, it’s a highly relevant increase in audience. 

We can be sure everybody who followed The Client’s Twitter page in those few days followed because they saw The Client on Dragons’ Den, meaning they’re very interested in what The Client has to say, and their products.

We also saw a massive increase in engagement and general interaction, such as retweets, quoted tweets and replies increasing rapidly. Overall it’s been an impressive boost.

Facebook

On the day of Dragons’ Den, Facebook generated 248 visits to the The Client’s site. On Monday, it generated 460, then Tuesday it generated 569.

As you can see the traffic continued rising and rising from Facebook. Some of this was from a Facebook Ad we setup prior to The Client appearing on Dragons’ Den. 

We setup an advert that would target people who visited the website from Sunday onwards, meaning that anybody who visited the site because they saw The Client on Dragons’ Den would see an advert in their Facebook timeline over the following days.

This is what the advert looked like:

The Client's Facebook retargeting ad
Our Facebook ad that targeted people visiting the website during Dragon’s Den.

This lead to a lot of highly relevant traffic being sent to the website which converted very well. The Client’s Facebook page also received a nice boost in likes. Again, I’ve added Saturday into the list so you can compare.

  • Saturday: 1959 page likes
  • Sunday (Dragons’ Den Day): 2371
  • Monday: 2592
  • Tuesday: 2736
  • Added 777 new likes in 3 days

A summary of Facebook stats

Facebook converted better and also sent more traffic to the website than Twitter did, without a doubt. This was also helped by our Facebook Ad we setup to retarget the people who’d visited the site because they’d found The Client on Dragons’ Den.

Facebook Ads are incredibly effective, and I consider it my favourite advertising platform on the planet right now. If you’re making a media appearance such as appearing on TV, I’d highly suggest doing the same as what we did: setup your Facebook Pixel to track users visiting your website, and hit them with an ad in Facebook a day after they originally heard about you.

Google Ads

The other really important advertising platform is Google Ads. This one has been around much longer than Facebook Ads, and Google practically invented the digital advertising game.

We’d been running an Google Ads campaign for some time prior to the Dragon’s Den appearance to point anybody searching for “The Client” towards our website.

We knew it was important we had this running during the TV appearance so we could capture all of the traffic that we didn’t get with natural search engine rankings.

Google Ads sent a good level of traffic to our site too.

The stats from our Google Ads campaign.

Our cost per click was extremely low (and actually half the cost of Facebook Ads), and the amount of pages that people were viewing during each visit showed us that the right kind of traffic was landing on the The Client’s website. 

There’s definitely room for improvement for the conversion rate, and this is what we’ll be working on next.

A summary overall

We’re still a little shellshocked by the amount of traffic that a tiny 10 minute slot on a 3 million views TV show has provided the website, and subsequently all other marketing channels. 

I’d read lots of articles similar to this one just before The Client appeared on Dragons’ Den, and I’d seen mixed reports of how much traffic to expect to a website.

The figure I saw bandied around was 10,000 viewers to your website at once, but we didn’t see this level of traffic. We still saw a very large 2600 users at once which got us sweating, but it was the effect of that initial traffic over the following days on sales and social media reach that surprised us the most.

Just a couple of things to remember if you’re appearing on a major TV show:

  1. Make sure your website can handle at least 2600 users at once browsing. That’s not in total over a period of time, that’s concurrently. That means all at once, not one after the other.
  2. Get your web developers to cache your website, lock it down, and not make any drastic changes in the prior 48 hours to going on TV. You don’t want anything to be broken or to make a bad impression, as these people likely won’t come back to your website again (unless you remarket to them—see next tip).
  3. Setup your Facebook Pixel to track people visiting your website, then send them an advert in Facebook the day after you’ve appeared on TV to recapture your audience and make sales.
  4. Setup a Google Ads campaign to capture people searching for your company name. That way you can be sure that everybody will land on your website and not a competitor’s.
  5. Consider setting up some kind of lead magnet: a free pdf, a free download or product that you can give away to capture an email address from a highly interested user.
  6. Whilst your site is getting battered from so much traffic, people probably won’t be able to browse your website as well as they’d like to. They will come back the day after though, so that’s the prime time to run your Facebook Ads and make sure you’re prepared for an increase in orders.
  7. If your website isn’t an ecommerce website, try and put something on there that will prompt the user to give you their details for a later purchase. If they’re interested, they will come back when they need you. See tip 5.
Photo of Craig Burgess

Craig Burgess

Craig is Genius Division's creative director. At weekends, he likes to strangle and grapple fellow Brazilian jiu-jitsu enthusiasts throughout the country. In his down time, he peruses the internet's finest cat videos.

If you’re someone who’s worked with a web developer or web designer before, you’ve probably been told it’s a cache problem. If this is you, you probably know how to clear your cache by now. It’s entirely possible though that you don’t know what on earth your cache is, or why you’d ever need to clear it!

What is a cache?

There’s a lot of different kinds of caching involved with web servers and browsers – some or all of which may be relevant to your website. Simply put, a cache is a store of files that can be used to speed up repeat operations.

Browser caching

When a web browser visits a website, the assets of that website are written to disk so they can be used again. You’ll likely notice the first time you load a website, it may take a little while, but on subsequent visits or visiting different pages it seems much quicker. This is usually because the browser has saved downloaded stylesheets, fonts and javascript to your computer or mobile device.

Simply put, a cache is a store of files that can be used to speed up repeat operations.

Depending on a site’s configuration and the frequency of changes, your cache may last a long time – this sometimes causes problems when working on new content, features or functionality for your website as you don’t see the new changes instantly; this is a good time to clear your cache or use a private window; private windows don’t generally share a cache with non-private sessions.

Server caching

Modern websites are complex. When you request a page from a dynamic website – such as one built on WordPress – the server has to compile the page. This can take many database queries, calls to external systems, running scripts…and many other steps! Gone are the days of serving up some nice straightforward HTML – well mostly, but that’s another topic for another day.

We employ server side caching to generate compiled copies of these dynamic pages for users of the website to download, so the same set of operations aren’t ran for each and every site visitor. This can either be done on-the-fly – when a user visits the site, a copy is stored for a pre-defined amount of time for any subsequent users or it can be preloaded, so that the page is immediately available for the next user that visits.

Server-side caching can greatly help when you’re getting a lot of traffic to your site at one time – it’s much easier for a web server to deliver a pre-compiled page to browsers than generating that page time and again for every single user.

DNS Caching

A website lives on a web server, and each web server has an IP address – this uniquely identifies a server on the web. When you buy a new domain name, you point this at an IP address.

Then, rather than your visitors needing to type a confusing series of numbers into their browser, they can just visit yourdomain.com – the browser asks your operating system where the domain is pointing to and brings the page to your browser.

Doing this for every request would be time consuming, and as websites don’t move around that often it makes little sense to make the same request again and again. So, your operating system – or office server, or Internet Service Provider – caches this result so it’s readily available.

This is great, until your shiny new website goes live and you can’t see it because you’re being sent to the old address! Generally after a few hours you’ll be sent to the right place and everything is grand. There’s things you can do to mitigate this problem.

Summary

There’s a lot more to each of these types of caching but hopefully this gives you a good overview of what someone is talking about the next time you hear them say “it’s probably just cached”.

Photo of Rich Keys

Richard Keys

Rich is Genius Division's technical director. When he's not building Lego or painting toy soldiers he's probably having fun with his kids. Lover of mountains and reading: Stephen King and Middle-earth are among his favourites.

A tweet by Tom Hirst last week prompted this article.

After thinking about this a little more, that’s not what this is about. If your product is rubbish, a client will cancel it in a heartbeat even if it’s costing them £2 per month.

No, what this is really about is a few different layers.

  1. Making a product that solves your client’s problems, not yours.
  2. Making a product that’s so good it can’t be compared.
  3. Making the price so good that it’s a no-brainer.

Ultimately, this is about making something so good it can’t be compared. I’ve called these mixed products, and agencies have the ability to make these all over the place. We just don’t.

Why make a “product”?

James wrote about why we started making this product and the underlying business need, but I’ll cover this briefly again.

Most agencies suffer from the same problems.

  1. Feast or famine: we’ve either got a lot of projects on or not enough.
  2. Project-based: we’re starting from scratch again and again. We want to get the project done, and out of the door.
  3. Lack of recurring income: speaks for itself.

We’d been thinking about number 3 for a long time. Most agencies do. I saw number 3 as a way to improve number 1 and 2.

I didn’t see this as “retainers”, as they’re still just selling our time. Whilst the time is secured each month and thus reduces some of the feast and famine mentality, we were still selling our time. Our time doesn’t scale, but a product should.

To know if you’ve got a good product, it should scale well: as you sell more of your product it should begin to cost you less. That cost can be in compounding experience, efficiencies, or actual money. Ideally all 3.

Retainer work—although secured each month—doesn’t offer any of those benefits.

So we returned to the drawing board and thought a little more about some kind of mixed product: the idea of combining two of our services together to create something so good you can’t compare it.

But let me first tell you why we’d hestiated for so long, because that’s probably where you’re at right now too.

Why didn’t we do this sooner?

Honestly? We saw hosting websites as a hassle. To us, not to our clients.

Previous to us creating our support product, we hesitated to even offer basic hosting. Despite our clients sometimes begging us to sort their hosting out for them, we hated doing it. We ended up doing it for a few clients, but our offers were almost custom to each client leading us back to our initial problem agencies suffer from: starting over every time you make something.

In the early days we bought a dedicated server, which was the beginnings of our hosting offerings. We didn’t know what we were doing with it though, and it wasn’t until Rich came on board that we could sort it. It still took us a while to sort out afterwards.

Rather than us answering what our clients wanted—a better way to host their websites—we just told them to find some hosting online that we’d recommend, or we’d host it for a nominal fee with a very normal hosting product.

Our clients found ad-hoc costs annoying for little website changes too. We’d change a logo, and bill a little bit of time for it. Then we’d have to chase it, and it’d end up costing us more than our original time.

The whole experience wasn’t good for us, wasn’t good for our clients, and we knew we could do better if we just listened to them.

So we started listening.

Make a product that solves your client’s problems, not yours

Our clients were facing 2 main problems:

  1. Not understanding the difference between our standard hosting and other options from other providers, other than the price.
  2. After a website goes live, not understanding what it might cost for changes and what might be included.

Once a website goes live, we often found ourselves in this uncomfortable situation with clients. We’d say we’d make any small adjustments (bugs, errors) to the website free of charge for the first month. Which was fine.

But then you get past that first month and suddenly there’s nothing there any longer. What does your client do now? We always told them we’d just charge them for our time because that was the “fairest” way for us to do it.

The truth was, it wasn’t that fair at all. Fair for us maybe, but it still left our clients with so many questions.

  • How long will it take you to do XXX?
  • What about if I want to do XXX?
  • How can I manage these costs?

I started thinking of this in terms of “aftercare”, as it helped me frame the product right. It’s not a retainer. It’s not a contract. It’s aftercare. It’s a protection plan.

So we got to thinking about a mixed product that could solve our client’s frustrations, and came up with our first draft of our support packages.

Making something so good it can’t be compared

A mixed product in our case was going to be a hosting product, a support product, and a consultancy product.

We wanted to give our clients access to our expertise across creative, technical and marketing every month, for a set fee. Basically, we were going to create a product that mixed things together from our other specialisms.

You can see a full breakdown of our current packages, but each package includes:

  • Excellent WordPress-specific hosting.
  • A portion of our studio time each month to use on the website at their request.
  • A portion of our studio time each month that we use to improve their website: speeding it up, fixing broken links etc.
  • Reporting: sensible reports that our clients could understand that shows how their website is performing.
  • Extras: depending on the level of package, we also include on-page SEO, content marketing, social media marketing and lots more.

Our goal was to pull together several things we were doing elsewhere into one irresistible package that isn’t like anything else.

When people say to us: is this your hosting?

We can say: no, this is much more than hosting. Then we show them.

What’s good about a mixed product is each part of the product compounds to make more than the sum of its parts. When you connect all these services together you have a product that can’t be compared to anything else.

You’ve made something so good it can’t be compared like-for-like. And not in a naff marketing way: in an actual real world way.

Making the price so good it’s a no-brainer (more value than they expect)

The truth is this should always be our goal, but as agencies I find we can get caught up in the idea of how much our time costs hourly more than how much people think it’s worth. And there’s often a big difference between those 2 things.

It might take you 2 hours to make a new banner for the homepage of your client’s website. Your hourly rate might be £50, so that just cost your client £100.

Was that worth it for the client?

It depends.

Does that new banner advertise a new sale on an ecommerce site which they’re about to make £30,000 from? Then yes.

Does the new banner just look nice? Then…maybe not. It’ll be harder for the client to rationalise.

We wanted to provide a support product that was more than just our hourly value. Something that seems so ridiculously good value that it makes no sense not to buy it.

We settled on a price—starting £100 per month—that seems too good to be true. On a pure cost value, it is. If we add up our cost value for the product, it costs more than the £100 per month. Which is exactly where we wanted it to land.

Your goal with anything should be to make the price a no-brainier. That doesn’t mean make it cheap. It means make the value and worth so obvious that the purchase becomes a no-brainier.

You should probably do this too

There’s opportunities to follow the methods I’ve outlined here in almost any business, not just agencies. Moving towards this model for us has made a huge difference to the way we approach our business, as well as our cash flow.

I’d love to hear how you’ve approached this if you’ve done anything similar. Laying out how we work is something we don’t do often enough.

Photo of Craig Burgess

Craig Burgess

Craig is Genius Division's creative director. At weekends, he likes to strangle and grapple fellow Brazilian jiu-jitsu enthusiasts throughout the country. In his down time, he peruses the internet's finest cat videos.

Genius Division will have been running ten years in August this year and over that time, we’ve learned a lot about designing and developing apps, websites, and brands. We’ve learned a lot about business too.

In our first few years, we worked project to project. As soon as one was done, it was billed and then we moved on to the next. A lot of businesses operate this way as there is simply no other way to do so. We found however, that not having even a small recurring income, left us exposed financially. What if one of us had to take time off due to illness? It would put a lot of pressure on the others to keep things going whilst also financially looking after everyone.

Our initial recurring income

The only real recurring income that Genius Division had was from hosting websites for our clients. We offered a basic, minimal service that kept our client’s websites online and not much else. In those days, it was up to the client to keep things up to date such as content as well as making sure that WordPress was kept up to date.

It was a fairly easy process to keep things up to date, they just had to log in and click update periodically. As we know though, when you’re running a business, you have countless other things to do than to remember to login and update a website. 

Our invoices were quite small and billed annually. They were priced similarly to what you’d pay if you were to find your own hosting and host the site yourself. 

The problem we found with this was that there were certain expectations that didn’t align between us and the client. Who should be updating the site? If the client was to host their own website and it got hacked, whose responsibility was this to fix it? We developed the site, but without proper maintenance from the user, it would be susceptible to faults and issues. 

With this in mind, we decided that we had to do something that took this ambiguity from us and our clients and give them something that would solve these problems. 

Research

We started looking at what other agencies were doing and also what other businesses not in our field were doing. A lot of agencies still used the same model as ours where they billed a client annually for hosting and didn’t do much else other than keep the site online. 

We looked to our existing clients too and asked them what they’d like to see. A lot of them wanted a hands-off approach, they were quite happy to have us look after everything and just get it off their plate but they also wanted us to give them advice on how to improve their site.

With this in mind, we started to look at a product for our clients that would include:

Rich has written about how we developed a hosting platform that would use the latest cloud technology to keep our clients’ sites running fast and importantly reliable. 

Craig goes into detail about the product that we developed and what it includes.

Recurring revenue

Once we were happy with our offering, we came up with three products for our clients that offered as a minimum, hosting, support and backup as well as a monthly report that detailed how their site was doing and what could be done to improve it. Higher packages included search engine optimisation and marketing services. 

Offering a more enhanced service meant that we had to increase our fees for these clients but with the extra value they were receiving, were happy to move over to these new products.

We decided that the best way for clients to pay for these products would be monthly as this means there’s not a lump sum to pay annually. 

Spreading the cost monthly was a benefit both to us and our clients as it allowed us to plan work in easily as well as giving us time to be more proactive with ideas and suggestions on how our clients could improve their sites. It also meant better cashflow for them.

Logistics

Offering monthly payments initially worked for us but we had problems, we’d send clients a small invoice, they’d forget to pay it or they’d think they’d just paid it when if fact it was last month’s. This lead to a lot of admin work for us chasing payments and importing transactions into our accounting system. 

Direct Debit looked a good option to us after some research and we found one that integrated seamlessly with our account package, FreeAgent. This meant that once a client had instructed us to look after their site, they were setup on our system and payments would be collected automatically without us or the client having to do anything. 

Conclusion

Since implementing these products four years ago, we’ve seen our recurring income increase and they now account for a third of our income at Genius Division. This allows us to constantly invest in our products to make them better for our clients. 

Photo of James Sheriff

James Sheriff

James is Genius Division's managing director. In his spare time, he's a keen photographer and walker. James commutes to work most days, rain or shine, on his bike and has managed to keep falling off to an acceptable minimum.

We’re proud of the hosting and support we offer at Genius Division – we try our best to serve WordPress sites as fast as possible and keep them secure, up-to-date and working hard for our clients’ businesses.

I’ve worked with a lot of different hosting offerings and personally I think what we’ve created is perfect for our client base and fits our workflow more seamlessly than any off the shelf product ever could.

A little bit of history – the problem

We started out with a single dedicated server with cPanel installed. A simple LAMP stack. No support, hardly any major Linux experience – cPanel allowed automatic backups that could be uploaded to an FTP server. We bought a HP micro server and I set it up at home behind the TV. File and database backups were transferred nightly to my house. Most of the time.

WordPress sites were GIT repos with some basic security hardening. Changes were pushed to repos, pulled into the server – sometimes this was automated, sometimes it was a manual process. All WordPress core and plugin updates were done by clients, until they forgot. Every now and again, someone wouldn’t update it and something would get hacked.

Server costs were steadily rising as we added new servers, firewalls, DDOS protection, backups, IP addresses – even with all this in place, if our provider had a hardware issue it would take down all our sites at once.

Coming up with a plan – the solution

We eventually decided we needed a big change because of a few factors.

We needed flexibility – when a client is featured on a popular blog or national TV, we needed the option to quickly scale up that client’s solution to meet demand.

We felt we had enough knowledge and experience – finally, we were in a position where we were comfortable looking after our own infrastructure, and that we could commit to supporting it when needed.

End-to-end control – one out of the Steve Jobs playbook I guess. The more control we had over client sites the better we can look after them. Cutting out hosting companies meant that instead of putting a ticket in if something goes wrong, we roll our sleeves up and get it fixed. In a fraction of the time it would take a hosting company engineer to get back to us.

Here’s an overview of the technology stack we use to host WordPress sites; our main thinking was to follow the Keep it simple, stupid (KISS) principle – as a small team, it’s important that we eliminate as much human error as possible so we can remain focussed on other tasks.

Servers

We use Linux VPS servers in Amazon AWS and Digital Ocean data centres. This means we can easily place a site in the best geographic region for it. Have a mainly US client base? Probably best to put your site in New York rather than Ireland.

We use a combination of PHP FPM, Nginx and MySQL to serve our WordPress sites. We can generally scale a site up within minutes to handle a traffic spike should we need to.

Security

Servers are behind virtual firewalls – SSH access is limited to our office IP; we use a VPN when working from home or when out and about. All sites are protected with Fail2ban to stop brute force protection. Where possible, WP login screens are locked down by IP.

Code

We’ve almost always used Bitbucket to host our private Git repositories. Initially to save cost – our team was small and GitHub charged for private teams.

Monitoring

We combine Uptime Robot, AWS & DO alerts and Slack to let us know the minute something isn’t right. If a site does experience issues, we’re never in the dark about it.

Backups & Disaster Recovery

Uploads and plugins are synced to AWS S3 buckets, along with database backups. Because we’re in complete control, we’re able to set this as frequently as we’d like.

We can usually deploy a copy of a site in less than 30 minutes, should we ever need to.

How long did it take?

It took almost two years to move our entire client base to our new infrastructure. It was a mammoth task; coordinating with clients and associated IT companies, whilst trying to minimise downtime as much as possible.

Was it worth it?

We’ve saved a bit of money on our monthly hosting bill, which we can reinvest elsewhere in to our hosting and support packages. For me though, it’s worth the work so that we can offer a better product. It comes with a bit more responsibility, but one of Genius Division’s strengths has always been how quickly we can react should we need to. It’s certainly not for everyone – 10 years ago we wouldn’t have dared to embark on such an endeavour.

Also, my wife was more than happy to get rid of the weird black box behind the TV.

Photo of Rich Keys

Richard Keys

Rich is Genius Division's technical director. When he's not building Lego or painting toy soldiers he's probably having fun with his kids. Lover of mountains and reading: Stephen King and Middle-earth are among his favourites.

Keeping a routine and staying productive is really tough when you’re away from your usual schedule.

A lot of the things you normally do provide anchors to your day. Even simple stuff like getting into the office and making a cup of tea (usually a mint tea for me) is a punctuation point in your day.

What do you do when that’s gone all of a sudden?

In the past couple of weeks Genius Division has had to rapidly switch to being a remote team. We’re now a fully remote team of 5.

In the first week I struggled working remotely as it’s not something I’ve ever done in the past. Despite working from a laptop (docked to a monitor), the most remote I ever get with my work is switching desks in the studio or sitting outside.

Of course I’ve occasionally worked away from our studio, but like James I prefer to be in there with everybody. It still feels a little strange working by myself all day.

At first, I struggled to focus. Primarily because I kept my email and Slack open all day long. There’s an assumption that when you’re not sat next to each other you need to be always available to chat with somebody as soon as they ask.

I think @round puts this better than I could on Twitter:

The problem with being always available is that you never get any quality work done because you’re always waiting to be available and you’re always responding.

It’s a hard balance to strike. Sometimes people need me immediately to answer questions on stuff they’re working on, but a lot of the time they don’t.

So, two of the first things I did were:

  1. Turn off all notifications on my computer, including Slack and email.
  2. When I wanted to do focused work, I turned Do Not Disturb mode on my phone.

I then checked these two things periodically myself, on my own terms instead of being dictated by my notifications. It’s helping me a lot.

I think working remotely has the potential to boost your productivity, but only if you allow it to. If you continue to spend all day in your email and responding to people like I did, it’s hard to focus on getting work done.

Photo of Craig Burgess

Craig Burgess

Craig is Genius Division's creative director. At weekends, he likes to strangle and grapple fellow Brazilian jiu-jitsu enthusiasts throughout the country. In his down time, he peruses the internet's finest cat videos.

Keeping in touch is hard when working with a distributed team. Personally, I much prefer working in an office where you can chat to each other and collaborate on work much easier. I’m all for togetherness.

That being said, I do see the merits in remote working such as:

  • no commuting, which is good for the environment,
  • not wasting time commuting, which is good for work/life balance,
  • the flexibility it brings to your day, which again, is good for work/life balance.

Video Conferencing

We’ve tried a few different tools to keep in touch such as SlackZoom and Google Meet. My preference is Google Meet. Google Meet allows you to video call with multiple participants and also share your screen. Screen sharing allows your client or co-worker to see your screen or vice-versa. This makes it handy for delivering presentations or troubleshooting issues remotely.

Here, Craig is sharing his screen and demoing the new Genius Division website.

Another boon for me with Google Meet is that it seems to work with my patchy wifi and doesn’t require any software downloads. This makes it ideal for sharing with clients and co-workers who may not be able to install extra software to video call. If they’ve got Google Chrome and a webcam, chances are, they’ll already have everything they need in order to get going.

Captions

You can also turn on captions whilst in a meeting, too. This will subtitle whoever is speaking in the meeting which may make it easier to follow when you’ve got patched sound. Whilst I wouldn’t rely on this, it does seem to work rather well but may struggle with accents. You’ll probably spend half the meeting trying to get it to slip up however which can be hilarious.

It’s available as part of Google’s G Suite package.

Photo of James Sheriff

James Sheriff

James is Genius Division's managing director. In his spare time, he's a keen photographer and walker. James commutes to work most days, rain or shine, on his bike and has managed to keep falling off to an acceptable minimum.

Working remotely is nothing new to me; for years I’ve worked at kitchen counters, on trains, in cars, pubs and from my home office – pretty much any where my laptop will fit. Things feel a little different when you don’t have a choice in the matter though!

We’ve never been in a situation where everyone is working remotely at the same time, and this has brought about its own set of challenges. It’s more important than ever at the moment that we pull together and get things done; both our reputation and survival depends on it.

Keep in touch with your customers and your suppliers – it shouldn’t be any different for those that you don’t see in person that often. You don’t always need to use Zoom or Skype, just picking up the phone for a chat about progress will help you feel a bit more normal.

When it comes to keeping up with your team, have a scheduled group call on a morning – or any other time you need to. Allow for at least 10 minutes of this to be chatting about all the random things you’d usually chat about; this will make you feel a bit more human and give you a break from your new and strange routine.

Photo of Rich Keys

Richard Keys

Rich is Genius Division's technical director. When he's not building Lego or painting toy soldiers he's probably having fun with his kids. Lover of mountains and reading: Stephen King and Middle-earth are among his favourites.