This time we will go through our project and present the technologies we used for ŌURA. The website was expected to have so many simultaneous users that a traditional website would not necessarily have been able to handle the load caused by it. Our challenging task was to create a website for Oura Health Oy that was supposed to handle hundreds of thousands of visitors per hour.
Oura Health Ltd, as the company is internationally known, is a Finnish start-up that, compared to many others, has done very well in the USA. It is also an interesting company in the sense that it started with a Kickstarter campaign , with which it has so far collected over 500,000 euros. Kickstarter is an American rewards-based crowdfunding service that focuses especially on the crowdfunding of creative projects.
A new generation well-being ring and its launch
Oura or Oura Ring is a well-being ring that differs from all other activity bracelets and other resembles. Unlike many products on the market, the Oura Ring does not focus on statistics related to how much you have walked, whether you remembered to be active or whether the day was spent mainly sitting.
In short, the Oura Ring analyzes sleep. So in practice, how did you fall asleep, how did the temperature change, how did the day's activity affect you, and whether you had time to recover properly. Hundreds of different measurements and their results are explained and presented in a very simple and clear way. The so-called "Our Readiness Score" indicates the state of the body and how good the general condition is.
The second version of the Finnish wellness ring was launched at the Slush event, where Oura created a truly wonderful show. As a product, the Oura Ring is unique and interesting which is the reason behind its success and the ring becoming a true hit. The ring works with Bluetooth and with the phone. The ring works with Bluetooth and with the phone. The phone also shows how much power is left in the ring.
As a solution to the challenge, dividing the Oura site into two parts
The challenge was that the information about the new Oura ring went out to the world at once – at the moment when Oura's CEO told about it in Slush. At the same time, a newsletter for existing customers and partners was sent out. In a very short time, the site received hundreds of thousands of visitors.
If you think about it from the website's point of view, this was an extremely difficult and challenging situation. In general, a website – whether WordPress-based or not – may not be able to handle such a large amount of visitors and traffic in such a short period of time. It should also be mentioned that at Oura's announcement event, all listeners were given a discount coupon that could be used to buy a new version of the Oura ring. At the latest at this point, everyone who was even slightly interested in the ring rushed to the site and many tried to buy the novelty ring in question.
Oura's online store uses WordPress' free WooCommerce e-commerce software. Due to the platform, we decided to split the previously fully WordPress-based site into two sections: the marketing site https://ouraring.com and the shop https://shop.ouraring.com .
We ended up splitting it into two because the majority of visitors go directly to ouraring.com. We created the site that opens from there with really easily scalable technology. In this way, we ensured that even when subjected to a large rush, the marketing website works and loads quite quickly. On the other hand, only those people who actually had the intention to buy moved to the second section, i.e. the store, which is why the online store had less traffic than marketing pages. Hardly anyone went to an online store without a willingness to buy after seeing the prices on the marketing pages first.
Design and technical implementation for both the marketing and the trade website
On the marketing website, we visually emphasized the new, stunning design. The site itself is static and its content is easily updated. Its HTML code has been generated and copied to dozens of servers around the world, so that the website https://ouraring.com is always loaded from the server closest to the visitor. When the product was announced on Slush , no problems were found on the website. Even after this, the site has not once crashed, rather has always worked perfectly and loaded really, really fast.
We chose the well-known and secure seravo.com as the web host for the store, which offers WordPress-optimized hosting taking into account both data security and speed. For Oura, the product release was vital, which is why we used the increased availability service offered by WP-palvelu.fi. In this case, even in the middle of the night, a person was constantly monitoring the store's metrics, so it would’ve been possible to immediately correct errors or increase the server's capacity in case of possible problems. However, there were no problems, everything went smoothly and worked flawlessly.
The blog also uses static technologies, thanks to which it loads quickly and is easy to maintain. It does not lose in ease of maintenance even to WordPress blogs. Despite being static, the blog also has dynamic functions, such as a search function.
All in all, the project was extremely challenging and the schedule was tight. With the successful project and product launch, Oura even received a surprising number of new orders. In fact, sales have been even better than estimated. The company has grown wildly and very quickly.
If your company has an important event ahead, a product launch, or something else, when a functional and high-quality website is more than necessary, contact us and ask for more information.
Share: