The first day (midnight to midnight) of the release of the 1911 Census went very well - we served up 3.4 million searches and 17.4million pages to 645,000 visitors who made 827,000 visits between them .

Technically the site held up exceptionally well - we used only a fraction of the available capacity available on the servers, meaning that the site reponse was fast with few errors all day: it remains so into the second day.

We expect the site to be very busy at launch, and so we have taken a number of measures to make sure that as many people as possible can get their searches completed successfully.

The first is that we have deliberately restricted some of the search functions on the site, meaning that the search is not as flexible as it will be later on - please see our separate post on the extra search functionality that will be ‘unlocked’ after launch.

Secondly, we are only allowing users to download original pages, rather than view them directly on the website - an in-page viewer will be switched on shortly after launch.

Thirdly, only one image will be available at launch: the principal side of the original household (or institution) page. Most searches have up to seven associated images, which will be made available to you shortly after launch. These extra images are included in the cost (30 credits) of the original page so you will not need to pay extra to view them once available. The images include the rear of the household form and images from the Enumerators’ books (akin to images from earlier censuses but with more detail and in full colour). Please see our separate post about the extra images - they are really rather exciting and unique to the 1911 Census!

During launch, if the site becomes exceptionally busy, we will also restrict the number of new people entering the site. We want to allow the people who are already using the site to complete their searches rather than make the site impossibly slow for everybody. We have built the site to withstand a very large (but not infinite) number of visitors, so if you find that you are not being allowed in, please bear with us.

We call this ‘velvet roping’ - much as you would restrict access to a building to large numbers of visitors to ensure the comfort of those inside, we will try to make sure that the experience of those searching is not overwhelmed by new visitors if the site becomes very busy.  Real-time service updates can be found on this blog, which we advise you to check frequently for the latest news.

Obviously, we will ‘unlock’ the powerful search features, switch on image viewers and add the extra images as soon as possible after launch and let you know by email and via this blog when we have done this. We cannot commit to specific dates for this yet, so please check here for the latest news or sign up for our newsletter (in the “My Account” area on the website).