The Ultimate Public Holiday Guide

Background

This website we created and designed ourselves. Wanting to find out about bank holidays in the UK we were frustrated at the poor quality of information and content on the internet already out there simply listing the existing bank holidays and little else. Any attempt at finding out more, like why do bank holidays exist in the first place, are bank holidays the same as public holidays, or are we indeed entitled to time off on a bank holiday, was near impossible to come by. Most websites were dreadfully designed as well.

How We Helped

So we did the research ourselves – as much an exercise in search engine optimisation as creating a wonderful website. This was an extensive task and involved considerable research as the quality of information was poor on highly ranked, authoritative websites, and incorrect assumptions had been made which, with a little deeper digging, could be corrected.

Furthermore it was our intention to create a welcoming and engaging site that people would find interesting. Built in WordPress with a custom theme the website features a large events calendar of awareness days, numerous tables and a large amount of content (some posts being over 3,000 words).

Outcome

The website’s scope is large. The more research we did the more dreadful websites we found that were either unengaging or just thin on content.

As with any new site, it took time to rank for its targeted keywords. Some ranked quickly, others less so but we created a good looking and informative website that did exactly what it said on the tin.

The site was relaunched in July 2020 and results have been spectacular. From an average of 1,000 visitors per month prior to relaunch (not great as we’d left it unattended for far too long) within eight months it had reached 21,000+ users per month, 95% of which comes from search engines, and by January 2022 it had reached 22,000+ users per month.

As of May 2025 the site reached 80,000 visitors per month, again of which 95% of traffic came from search engines.

Clearly, being a date-based website, traffic ebbs and flows with the frequency of holidays but there is so much more we can do (it really comes down to time).

Lots of new content was added particularly around the increasingly popular phenomenon of awareness days. Keyword research and creating great content has clearly paid off as it ranks very well for key terms such as ‘patron saints UK’, various bank holiday keywords, Church of England and Catholic holidays and so on.

(Note: with so many awareness days and the need for its constant updating it was difficult to keep up, given we have a business to run and clients to serve at the same time, so this part of the site has been put to one side for the time being. There are only so many hours in the day.)

It was such fun making the site but there’s a long way to go so check back and see how the site grows over time.