The oilprice team and their contributors publish a LOT of articles and insight daily so we all agreed that the time was right for them to start publishing LIVE articles, especially as they reported on the fluctuations in fuel prices in the lead up to the US election.

A LIVE article is one where it’s updated frequently throughout the day, but rather than just a normal article being edited, a LIVE article shows the time of each update. There’s also semantic mark up involved so that we tell Google “this is a live article, this is what we’re doing”. Around the site we also had a “LIVE” icon which pulsed to draw attention to it so that people noticed this specific article more.

We added a “pinned” / featured update so especially important updates can be kept at the top of the article, and we devised additional ideas for Phase 2 for automatically updating the article – if the editorial team aren’t able to for any sustained period – with charts of the latest fuel data, so that the article stays constantly being fresh for Google.

Like with everything on oilprice.com, we needed to be sure the site could handle high levels of traffic, as the site can receive up to 2.4 million visitors in 1 day which is 70,000 people at any one second. And if anywhere near this many people were sat with a live article on their desktop all day, which had to be constantly checking itself for updates and then showing those updates without refreshing, all aspects of their complicated auto scaling infrastructure needed to be able to handle it. So we extended the caching systems we’ve built on AWS over the years and monitored the site closely during the days leading up to the election and then on election day itself.

Being a busy news site, oilprice AMP pages also receive a lot of traffic, and live JavaScript updates in AMP articles was potentially going to be the tricky part of this project, but all went smoothly thanks to the skill and experience of our inhouse developers.

We’re looking forward to seeing the oilprice team use this feature more and more “out in the wild” to help give them a competitive edge over their rivals in Google, as it indicates to Google what a authoritive source of information they are. If you think you’d like a hand implementing LIVE articles, or just any more advanced server scaling, caching or technical SEO, please get in touch.