The Wave | Website build and national launch infrastructure support

Project overview
The Wave is an exciting inland surfing lagoon, located in Bristol, UK, that delivers perfect surfing conditions all year round. The project focuses on improving health and wellbeing through surfing.

The website for The Wave is an essential part of their business. It provides comprehensive information about the surfing experience and is the primary access point to the booking platform.

To ensure that the booking process is as seamless as possible, The Wave need their website to be both reliable and robust.

There was an opportunity to improve the existing site’s uptime and page load speeds. It was important to ensure that as The Wave got closer to launch, the infrastructure could cope with the higher demand that it would inevitably experience. Omni Digital were brought on board to analyse the existing online systems and to plan for a more robust infrastructure.

We set about analysing the existing site’s performance on the current infrastructure to establish a benchmark.

To confirm that the changes made were adding value for the end-user, we needed to test our work at every stage. These tests meant we could deliver a robust, long term solution that is reliable and expandable.

Our solution
We developed a test matrix to document the performance of each iteration of the set-up. This enabled us to ascertain how many *page requests per second the site could handle from end users.

From the original setup, to more efficiently reallocating system resources, through to fully load balanced application servers, Omni Digital populated the matrix with over ten test scenarios to identify and deliver the most efficient performance upgrades.

Impacts
The new set up can manage considerably more requests, meaning the website can now cope with a much larger amount of traffic. The Wave website now delivers a reliable, consistent experience that is accessible and isn’t overcrowded, in line with their vision for The Wave:

On 25th October 2019 The Wave received national press coverage including the homepage of The Guardian online and BBC breakfast news, this led to a huge spike in web traffic and therefore a significant increase in demand from the servers.

This gave us live data to analyse. The website successfully managed a 4566% increase without any issues, demonstrating the robust design of the system and the flexibility it provides through the multiple server design. This meant thousands of users were able to access the website in the same minute without issue.

The Wave can now be confident their website will support their users through any future events and coverage.