Ebow Digital partnered with the National Archives of Ireland to design and develop the online experience for the 1926 Census, creating a high-performance digital platform capable of making a vast and complex historical dataset accessible to audiences in Ireland and around the world.
A century after it was first recorded, the 1926 Census was opened to the public by the National Archives of Ireland, and the response was immediate.
What would typically be around 5,000 daily visitors became more than 834,000 people across the weekend. What might be 50,000 daily page views became over 20 million pages explored.
Families searched for names, historians traced patterns, and people followed their own curiosity into the past.
This was always going to be a significant cultural moment.
On 18 April 1926, the Irish state captured a detailed snapshot of a young nation – its people, its homes, its language and identity. One hundred years later, that snapshot is now publicly accessible for the first time.
From the moment it launched, it resonated widely.
Featured across RTÉ, The Irish Times, The Independent and picked up internationally by The Guardian, the census quickly became part of the national conversation.
At the official launch, Taoiseach Micheál Martin was joined by centenarian ambassadors – people who were alive at the time of the census – who shared their own experiences.
Micheál Martin – Taoiseach, Brian Dobson – Irish journalist, Patrick O’Donovan – Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media of Ireland and Orlaith McBride – Director of the National Archives of Ireland.
We’re very proud to have been there too and to have played a role in making all of this possible.
Following our work on the National Archives website, and the 1901 and 1911 Census releases, we partnered again to design and build the online experience for the 1926 collection.
Alongside usability and clarity, a key consideration this time was scale.
When a release carries this level of public interest, the platform needs to perform under pressure from the outset. Working in partnership with WordPress VIP, we built an experience designed to handle significant spikes in demand while remaining fast and reliable.
Over the course of the launch weekend, that approach was tested in real conditions and held up.
The platform integrates a large and complex dataset delivered via the Derilinx platform, but the experience itself is designed to feel straightforward and intuitive.
Search is fast and flexible. Results can be refined easily. Records are presented in a clear, structured way. Users can move between searching, browsing and exploring geographically without friction.
The aim throughout was to make the archive approachable, whether someone arrived with a specific name in mind or simply wanted to explore.
The 1926 Census offers a detailed view of life at the time: a population of just under 3 million, a country where 92.6% identified as Catholic and 18.3% spoke Irish.
What stands out, though, are the individual stories within that detail – names, addresses, occupations, households. Familiar threads that connect directly to people exploring the records today.
Projects like this don’t come along often.
Building a website for national-scale traffic
Scalability: designing for huge launch-day demand.
WordPress VIP: enterprise hosting/infrastructure.
Complex data integration: integration with the Derilinx platform.
Search and UX: making an enormous historical dataset straightforward to explore.
Performance: maintaining speed under exceptional load.
Accessibility: making an important national resource usable by as broad an audience as possible.
834,000+ visitors
Launch weekend
20 million+ page views
Across launch weekend
700,000+ household returns
Made digitally accessible
Almost 3 million individual entries
Digitised
To contribute to something of this scale, and to see it used so widely within hours of launch, has been a genuinely rewarding experience for our team.
Building digital platforms at this scale requires strategy, UX, great web design and technology to work together from the outset. From high-traffic public information web development to complex enterprise platforms and searchable digital archives, Ebow Digital designs and develops digital experiences built to perform when it matters.