Last year, I had an opportunity to speak at Vietnam Web Summit. The topic was Building a high-traffic website, where I shared the case study of building the website https://vinmec.com – a very high-traffic system in Vietnam that serves hundreds million visits annually.

Background

zen8labs have been working with Vinmec International Hospital since 2019, taking part in their digital transformation journey. Together, we built the strategy and development roadmap to create a robust, scalable website. The objective is firm, but the detailed plan is always adapted to the context. Is building a website a one-off or short-term project? It depends on your objectives and approach. The website has been continuously developing for more than four years, and we see many areas for improvement.

Related news: zen8labs’ position under Top Software Development Company (Vietnam))

How to build a high-traffic website

Building a high-traffic website is a challenging task that requires the right approach and detailed implementation. Here, I’d like to share some overall challenges and our solutions to overcome them.

Strategy

Every company wants a high-traffic website because it can generate a high volume of leads or at least help with brand awareness. However, a high-traffic website needs high investment and can be costly without a clear objective and approach. Here are three common questions you need to answer before getting started:

1. What are the roles of the website? The website is a channel to bring your customers closer to your company and services. How “close” should it be? Is it for branding, lead generation, or a sales channel? For example, the zen8labs website is primarily for branding and somewhat for lead generation, while an e-commerce website must serve as a sales channel.
2. How does the website play its role? This involves how the website acquires and handles traffic, whether from organic or paid sources.
3. What are the differences between the websites? Like any product, the website must provide unique values to the end user (unique selling points – USPs).

With Vinmec, their strategy was clear:

1. Roles of the website: As the largest private healthcare system in Vietnam, Vinmec aims to enhance brand visibility and generate leads through the website.
2. How it plays its role: Vinmec focuses on long-term brand building and attracting quality traffic through an SEO approach to generate organic traffic.
3. UPS: Quality content is essential for attracting quality traffic. Therefore, most articles on the website are written by doctors or specialists to ensure reliability.

User experiences

User experience is crucial for any service, not just website. How can we deliver great experiences to users at every touch point on the website?

1. Mobile-friendly design: Mobile is the primary option for users today, especially for on-demand content. If you have a symptom, you want to google it right away, right?
2. Brand engagement: The website is a touch point of a brand. It needs to maintain brand awareness while keeping a simple design.
3. Retention & return: Traffic comes from different sources: new and returning users. It’s better to have loyal users. A memorable product and brand demonstrate brand quality.
4. Conversion: Ultimately, the website must demonstrate its value. For a lead generation strategy, the conversion from visits to bookings is an important metric.

Together with Vinmec, we implemented several solutions:

1. Trademark content: Content is king in an SEO approach. Many companies copy and modify content from other sources to quickly provide large amounts of content. With GenAI, this job is even easier. However, we avoid this approach to protect brand reputation and provide high-value content to users.
2. Multiple types of content: While text is important, it can be boring. Vinmec offers various types of content, such as images, videos (e.g., a YouTube channel), and tools to engage users.
3. Convenient booking: To increase conversion, booking should be accessible at the right time and place. Users need only fill in enough information to receive support from Vinmec.
4. Tracking: To ensure we are heading in the right direction, we continuously track user behavior anonymously.

Technologies

Building a robust and highly available system is never easy in terms of technology. Several main technology issues include:

1. Global users: Serving global users means zero downtime. The system needs to perform consistently running 24/7.
2. Traffic peaks: Even though traffic comes from anytime and anywhere, some hours have significantly higher traffic. This requires sizing and optimizing the system for the best performance within the best budget.
3. System design: We must build a good-enough architecture to support continuous experiments while maintaining high system maintainability.

The website primarily transfers data from server to client with less personalized data, making it advantageous to apply caching and CDN… best practices. We also use cloud infrastructure to ensure reliability and scalability.

It’s a significant challenge, and as much as we’d love to share more details, we cannot due to privacy concerns.

Content

The website attracts high traffic by providing high value to many users. What is the value? Content. How do we generate a large amount of quality content?

• Keyword: In SEO, keywords are crucial.
• Publishing process: Writing hundreds of thousands of articles requires many people and organized work. This website is comparable to a mid-size newspaper. An effective process helps organize everything, and we built the tools to help boost performance.
• Idea generation: How do we continuously generate new content ideas? Vinmec opened a Q&A section on the website, allowing users to ask questions. These questions are answered by doctors or specialists and used as ideas for new articles.

Collaboration

Building a high-traffic website with a vast amount of content requires many hands from different expertise. This raises collaboration challenges:

• Multiple stakeholders: Different interests, knowledge, and experiences can create challenges.
• Maintaining good initiatives: While managing multiple demands, we must maintain a good setup for initiatives and ensure quick growth if there are positive results.

It’s essential to return to the basics of project management, with stakeholder engagement, to ensure every team member finds their interests in the project. We promote any idea but maintain a data-driven mindset in every conversation. This emphasizes the importance of the right metrics and tracking system.

Lesson learned

By addressing many challenges, here are our lessons learned:

1. Set a clear role for the website in the big picture (usually in digital transformation) and define a clear objective for the website.
2. Define the right metrics at the right time. In our journey, it started with visits, then retention, then conversion, and finally both new and recurring traffic.
3. Measure, measure, measure. Conduct small experiments, measure, and adjust with a data-driven mindset, always tied to key metrics.
4. Collaboration is crucial. A high-value website (to the end-user) requires tight integration of materials from various skill sets. Engage different stakeholders as soon as possible.

Conclusion

We extend a special thanks to Vinmec for allowing us to share this information publicly. It provides the community with a case study on building an excellent website. Thanks to the Vietnam Web Summit for helping us reach a wider audience. As a consultancy and development agency, zen8labs has many interesting case studies ready to share in our blog and public events. If you would like to get more insights and slides, please contact us.

Tom Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO