GovCMS, the Government website hosting and content management system, has reported record numbers of visits at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as Australians accessed critical information online to protect their health and safety.
The Department of Finance, which houses of the GovCMS team, said the team was able to maintain the stability and resilience of the service.
“The platform automatically scaled up during huge spikes in traffic, and handled an unprecedented volume of visitors to websites,” Finance said.
“At the peak of the pandemic, the GovCMS platform experienced 100,000 page views per minute; 187,000 concurrent users on the platform; [and] two billion hits in a month,” it said.
“Health.gov.au experienced a 760 per cent increase in traffic with up to six million visits a day, and servicesaustralia.gov.au experienced a 650 per cent increase in traffic.”
Finance said many other sites on the platform also experienced very large increases in visits such as Smart Traveller, Safe Work Australia, The Victorian Department of Health and Human Services and the South Australian Department of Education.
General Manager of Services Australia, Susie Smith said the GovCMS team had ensured the Agency’s website was always available and could supply information to the public during the pandemic.
“We worked closely with the GovCMS team to increase our database capacity to ensure the Services Australia website could manage heavy traffic,” Ms Smith said.
“In a very tight timeframe, and under significant pressure, they seamlessly executed a database upscale with no downtime,” she said.
