Full Fat Things partnered with the Official Charts Company to completely transform their website, ensuring it appeals to both long-time chart followers and the mobile-first, video-driven Gen Z audience.
The previous site was struggling with outdated technology, slow performance, limited video content, and poor mobile optimisation. With fluctuating traffic peaks – especially during Friday chart releases – the need for a modern, scalable, and ad-friendly platform was clear.
We delivered a headless Drupal solution with a Nuxt Vue.js front end, running on auto-scaling AWS infrastructure. This allowed for faster load times, seamless editorial control through Drupal’s Layout Builder, and a rich, engaging user experience designed around video, playlists, and artist insights.
Key features of the new site include:
• Over 5.8 million chart data points and thousands of new artist, album, and video pages.
• Mobile-first design optimised for speed, SEO, and premium video advertising.
• Scalable architecture that automatically handles traffic surges.
• Embeddable charts and stat blocks for external sites.
• User accounts, personalised newsletters, and community engagement tools.
The result is a futureproof platform that grows the Official Charts’ audience, increases advertising revenue, and secures its place as a leading voice in UK music culture – from Top of the Pops fans to the TikTok generation.
From TOTP Fans to the TikTok Generation
The Official Charts have been a cornerstone of British music culture since the 1950s, originally recognised as the official singles chart for BBC Top of the Pops and Radio 1’s Chart Show. Today, the Official Charts Company tracks the UK’s most popular singles, albums and films across a wide range of genres.
But with audiences and technology evolving, the Official Charts needed a major digital transformation. While loyal music fans still visit the site for deep statistics, artist histories and chart insights, there was a growing need to engage the mobile-first, video-driven Gen Z audience, who expect the same seamless experience they get from TikTok, Spotify and YouTube.
At Full Fat Things, we partnered with the Official Charts to completely rebuild their platform – delivering a site that’s faster, more engaging, packed with new content, and capable of handling huge traffic surges, all while increasing advertising revenue and future-proofing the brand.
The Challenge
The previous Official Charts website was struggling to meet the needs of modern users and the business.
Key challenges included:
• An outdated, corporate design with limited video content and a poor mobile experience.
• Slow performance, failing Google’s Core Web Vitals and impacting SEO rankings.
• No support for video-first advertising, limiting commercial opportunities.
• Highly variable traffic, with major spikes during Friday chart releases and events like the Christmas Number One.
• The need to cater to both long-time chart enthusiasts and a younger, digital-native audience.
The Objectives
The Official Charts Company had clear goals for the new platform:
• Improve speed and SEO performance.
• Deliver a video-rich, mobile-first experience.
• Maximise video advertising opportunities.
• Empower editors with flexible, easy-to-use content tools.
• Expand chart content to stay relevant in today’s music landscape.
• Engage both legacy users and new audiences.
Our Solution
Creative and Technical Approach
We started with interactive wireframes, allowing the Official Charts team to test and refine user journeys. These prototypes demonstrated how users could easily explore singles, albums, films, news stories and deep statistical insights, all connected through a richer, more intuitive experience.
Headless Drupal Architecture
We chose Drupal to manage the platform’s complex content relationships. By using a headless CMS approach, we separated the content management from the front-end presentation, creating a flexible, futureproof system:
• Drupal handles all content, layouts and media.
• Vue.js with Nuxt powers the fast, modern front end.
• The Lupus Decoupled module delivers structured content as JSON.
• Layout Builder puts editors in full control of page design, allowing them to create and update layouts in real time without developer support.
This architecture means the Official Charts team can create, customise and update content on the fly, while delivering a smooth, app-like experience for users.
Scalable AWS Infrastructure
With major spikes in traffic during chart announcements and high-profile events, we built an auto-scaling infrastructure on AWS using:
• Amazon RDS for database management.
• Elastic Container Service (ECS) for containerised hosting.
• Elasticache (Redis) for caching and speed.
• CloudFront CDN to distribute traffic globally and ease backend load.
The system automatically scales from just a few containers overnight to over 16 containers during peak times, ensuring stability without unnecessary costs.
Everything (and More)
The relaunch brought massive improvements, including:
• Over 50,000 artist pages
• 5.8 million chart data points
• 88,000 singles pages and 79,000 album pages
• 55,000 video pages, vastly expanding media content
Users can now play entire charts with one click, creating a playlist-style experience that increases engagement and time on site. Singles pages feature 30-second video snippets where available, along with links to purchase tracks on services like Apple Music and Amazon.
The video-rich environment makes the site far more appealing to advertisers while offering the seamless, high-speed experience that Gen Z users expect.
Extending Reach
The platform is built for growth. New chart types can be added easily, keeping the site current and deeply embedded in the wider music conversation.
Other publishers can now embed Official Charts directly into their own sites, complete with real-time chart data and stat blocks. This means music publications writing about the latest releases from artists like Lewis Capaldi or Harry Styles can include rich historical data and performance insights directly in their articles.
Don’t Forget the Classics
While modernising the site, we kept the features that long-time fans love:
• In-depth stats and chart histories.
• Editorial news, analysis and opinion.
• Community discussions via Disqus, with migrated comments that continue to drive page views and valuable first-party data.
A new login feature also allows users to create free accounts, curate their preferences, and receive personalised newsletters, setting the stage for more tailored experiences in the future.
The Results
The new Official Charts platform is:
• Blazing fast, fully optimised for mobile and video.
• Massively scalable, with infrastructure that adapts to demand.
• Flexible and futureproof, thanks to a headless Drupal setup.
• Packed with rich content, including video, audio, charts and artist insights.
• Attractive to advertisers, with premium video ad opportunities.
• Designed for all audiences, from die-hard chart followers to the TikTok generation.
Conclusion
The Official Charts Company now has a digital platform built for the future – one that balances the rich history of British music culture with the demands of today’s audiences and advertisers.
With cutting-edge technology and a user-first design, the new site ensures the Official Charts remain a vital part of the national music conversation, delivering chart-topping content every single week.
Because when it comes to digital experiences… the only way is up.
Drupal was chosen for the Official Charts rebuild because of its powerful capabilities in managing complex content relationships at scale, as well as its flexibility to support both current needs and future growth.
Specifically, Drupal was selected because:
✅ Robust Content Management: With tens of thousands of artist pages, millions of chart positions, and dynamic content types like singles, albums, videos and news, Drupal’s ability to handle structured content made it the perfect fit.
✅ Headless Architecture Support: Drupal works brilliantly as a headless CMS, exposing content as JSON APIs that power a fast, modern front end (in this case, built with Vue.js). This keeps content management centralised and familiar for editors while delivering a high-performance, app-like experience for users.
✅ Layout Flexibility: Drupal’s Layout Builder gives the Official Charts editorial team total freedom to create and customise pages, drag and drop components, and launch new features without developer input.
✅ Scalability: Drupal is proven at scale, capable of supporting millions of data points and high traffic volumes – critical for a site like the Official Charts, which experiences huge spikes during key events like Friday chart updates.
✅ Community and Extensibility: Drupal’s open-source ecosystem provides a wealth of modules and a large, active community, making it a reliable, future-proof foundation.
✅ Seamless Editorial Workflow: The Official Charts team needed a system that allowed them to react quickly to breaking news, update charts, and publish multimedia content – all of which Drupal supports with ease.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
