It has always fascinated me when watching Dragons’ Den that companies do not ensure their website is ready for a huge influx of traffic. Without fail, every single time I go on a pitching company’s website, it crashes.

As long as the idea is good, regardless of whether the dragons invest, it’s an amazing platform to showcase your product and drive huge awareness in your brand. So why don’t companies plan ahead?

I was delighted when I found out that one of our clients would be pitching to the dragons – which would in turn give us the chance to ensure their website was robust enough to handle the influx of traffic.

Baggers Originals pitched to the dragons on the 2nd February and were fortunate enough to secure funding from Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden. Of course, the actual pitch took place months before and, although confidentiality agreements meant we couldn’t talk about it to anybody until the show aired, it did mean we could plan well ahead.

We produced what we hoped would be a bullet-proof low cost simple solution. It was, and it worked like a dream. Over the course of a two-hour period, 28,000 people hit the website, with traffic peaking at 10,600 people on the site at the same time. Watch it live here!

So what was the solution?
The solution was simple – two single landing pages that would reduce server load over the weekend. The first holding page went up on the Saturday well before the show to ensure the page was live and visible to all site visitors. The page simply alerted people to an exciting announcement happening at 9pm on Sunday night along with a countdown to the announcement. 302 redirects were used site-wide, from all of the e-commerce site’s links, to ensure domain equity was maintained and to ensure nobody got the dreaded ‘Page Not Found’ error.

The second page went live at 9pm on Sunday night. The simple page had an announcement welcoming Dragons’ Den viewers, some basic information about the product, a promotional video and a statement saying why we were running a simple version of the site. It also had a data capture form where people could sign up to receive a notification when the full site was back up, as well as future newsletters, and Twitter and Facebook plugins so Baggers could update the page regularly.

Finally, there was a discount code for people to purchase when the full site came back up.

All content was hosted by CloudFlare to minimise the load on the server.

In total, over 28,000 people visited the site over the two hours with traffic peaking at 10,600 people on the site at one time. Twitter followers went up from 1472 to 3,306 and Facebook likes went from 1,472 to 2,057.

The solution wasn’t without downsides – no one could buy any products during the show, but as soon as the surge of traffic died down, the full e-commerce site went back up. Orders started to flow immediately and by contacting the hundreds of people who submitted their email address after the programme finished, we didn’t let anyone down and gained maximum PR for the client.

So, if you are a business about to go on Dragons’ Den…. you know what kind of traffic to expect and what you should do – and if you need any help, just ask!

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