After a decade of crashes, we did a complete overhaul of the official Lithuanian weather service

Until 2024, Meteo.lt website hasn’t been changed for a decade. The page was infamous for it’s slowness – even under a modest traffic it was being loaded for 5-10 seconds.

What’s more, whenever a storm would visit the country (along bringing thousands of people rushing to check the weather stats), the website would simply crash, unable to hold even slightly increased visitor numbers. During extreme situations, when hundreds of thousands of individuals would receive SMS messages warning about a natural disaster, the webpage would immediately become useless.

We admit, this is one of the most complex public websites, with countless weather formulas, maps, radars and integrations. It’s that complicated that the company who won the previous tender, after a closer inspection, decided to withdraw from the contract. The requirements were indeed strict.

The integrations were connected via transitional foreign servers, slowing the loading process drastically. We got rid of these intermediates – now everything goes directly through Meteo servers. Sounds simple, but this required rewriting the integrations from scratch.

The results showed that, while earlier the website would crash whenever traffic slightly increased, today it not only stays online, but doesn’t even slow down during storms, when masses storm in: t still loads under a second!

Neskaitant greitaveikos, taip pat tinklapį patobulinome taip:

1. Fundamentally reworked mobile version
2. Autodetection of visitor’s town
3. Homepage used to show 3 days forecast, now immediately shows the entire week
4. See morning, day, evening and night forecast. This didn’t exist before, and we needed to rewrite the entire forecast algorithm for that
5. Website remembers the cities you previously viewed, so you can open them with 1 click
6. Simplified dictionary: away with bureaucratic terms in favor of ones that are easily understood. Example: instead of „factual weather” we simply state „now”. Instead of „hydrological data”: „water info”.
7. Brand new content management system according to the good UX practises, weather warning, easier administering for employees

This was a long effort by the entire team. In the end, we did considerably more than requirements required. Because we visit this site daily ourselves, we wanted to release a good product into the world, instead of following the requirements blandly. This is a rare case in government tenders. Even though the project didn’t make a profit, this is our tribute to the society – we hope people will appreciate the new website.

The second largest news outlet in Lithuania went ahead and wrote an article about this: Trees break, but no longer does Meteo.lt