GOV.UK display screen
The GOV.UK display screen provides a snapshot of recent activity on GOV.UK, including:
- the number of users on GOV.UK in the last 30 minutes
- recent searches
- the most popular content in the last 7 days
- recently published pages
The display screen was first created in May 2013. The screen was broken and then deprecated for a period in 2023-24 and the original repository was archived.
However, in late 2024 the display screen was fixed and reinstated by the Insights and Analytics team, who created a new repository for the work.
Using the display screen
Get access to the GOV.UK display screen
The GOV.UK display screen is on display in the GDS London office.
Display screen data definitions
| Field name | Definition | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Users on GOV.UK in the last 30 minutes | The number of activeUsers in the last 30 minutes |
Data refreshed every 30 seconds |
| Live Searches | Search terms extracted from the unifiedScreenName of the most popular pages |
This only indicates the most popular recent search terms. Data is updated every minute |
| Popular in the last 7 days | The top 10 pages on GOV.UK by screenPageViews in the last 7 days |
Data refreshed every three hours |
| Recently Published | Recently published content, pulled from the GOV.UK RSS feed | Data updated every minute |
Recent searches are extracted from page titles due to limitations with the Google Analytics Data API’s realtime reporting. The search term dimension is not available, so instead the query returns the 2000 most popular pages on GOV.UK and extracts the search terms from the page titles of the search results pages within that 2000.
How the GOV.UK display screen works
The up-to-date GOV.UK display screen code can be found on GitHub in the govuk-display-screen-2024 repository.
Data sources
The GOV.UK display screen queries the Google Analytics Data API to obtain realtime Google Analytics data. The GA4 Data API queries can be found in the GA4_handlers folder of the GitHub repository.
The list of recently published content is pulled from the https://www.gov.uk/government/feed RSS feed.