Archived: Website traffic during the Tube strike

We’re seeing some high volumes of traffic on the site today (Wednesday 30th April), with 3 times the normal volume of traffic on average as people check out their travel options during the ongoing Tube strike.

This morning’s peak again fell between 7-8am (143,000 visits), although this was about 30 per cent fewer visits than during yesterday’s peak.

Visits to our website over the last 2 days, compared to a 'normal' day and February's strike
Hourly visits to our website over the last 2 days, compared to a ‘normal’ day and February’s strike

  • The TfL website received 2 million visits yesterday and over 9 million page views, with peak traffic between 7-8am when the site served nearly 900,000 pages.
  • This represents a three-fold increase from a normal day, though during the rush hour peak traffic was nearly 9 times greater than normal.
  • After the Home page, the Tube Status update page was the most popular, receiving over a million visits from 784,000 unique devices – this is 16 times more than ‘normal’  levels.
  • The Journey Planner results page was viewed 1.8 million times, compared to 500,000 views on a ‘normal’ day.
  • So far today, the Tube status update page has knocked the Home page from its top slot with a quarter of a million visits – 60 per cent of which have been via mobile devices.
  • Mobile traffic peaked today between 6-7am when 79 per cent of visits came via mobile devices.
  • As yesterday, we’re expecting traffic to rise again today between 4-7pm, although not to the levels seen this morning.

We appreciate the strike is making it harder to get around than normal, we’re doing all that we can to make the site as useful as possible.

If you’ve got any feedback on how it can be made better, then we’d love to hear about it so we can improve things for the future.

5 Comments

  1. Even though I like the new visual design, it’s hard to get an overview of the situation.
    3 issues for me:

    1. The interactive map isn’t the most usable, and it’s slowish even on fast computers. I can’t see which stations are open and which are closed. They should be clearly marked on the map.

    2. The status terminology is not consistent. You use “special service” even when the line is closed (e.g. yesterday after 11pm), yet at other times you use “closure” or “suspended”! This makes it really hard to quickly understand the status, without having to click on a line. The old site would at least show more information on mouse hover (and had more consistent use of terminology). Special service is obviously wrong, when the entire line is not running, for whatever reason.

    3. I couldn’t for the life of me find the departure boards. So I did a search for “departure boards”. Oh my….. Couldn’t believe how bad the search could be on a new website! ALL results on the first 8 pages are titled “Visit Docklands”, and several are just titled “{document name}”. VERY disappointing… Did anyone try the search before you released it?

    Thanks.

  2. On a phone it is really, really hard to get quickly to the information you need to travel about London – live departure boards for tube stations, maps, not text, showing which bits of lines aren’t working properly or at all, which stations along a line are closed, etc. Having to click through layers and layers of information is impractical and frustrating – the information needs to be available without having to do that.

  3. I had no issue with the site, when I visited it this morning, finding the information I needed quite simply. I had a great day out in London, with my family, and found the TFL staff that I encountered to be very helpful and knowledgeable.

  4. The new website looks nicer than the old one but is less functional in several ways: the graphics take longer to load, particularly on a mobile device. The old site let you get a map showing bus stops at a tube station. Also the map labels, for names of tube stations etc. are less usefully placed, often obscuring roads. Overall not an improvement.

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