Tax Websites Performance Report 2015

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Reports Archive 2005-2015

Performance Tracking > 2015 Tax Websites

Websitepulse 2015 Tax Performance & Uptime Report Summary

Tax season has just ended on April 15th and so we finished monitoring 12 of the most popular tax filing websites.

As a monitoring company, we can’t stress more on the importance of having flawless performance and availability of your websites. You do not want to frustrate your visitors by having to:

wait for too long to load pages of your website
start a transaction all over again because your website froze
go to a competitor who will have faster-loading pages and less downtime and what not

We decided to monitor 12 of the most popular tax filing websites to see whether they encountered any major outages and whether they were well-prepared to handle the heavy traffic load. Here’s what we found:

Performance (response time):

Most of the monitored websites demonstrated a relatively fast response time. Taxslayer.com, however, may have experienced an outage as its average response time reached over 22 seconds. Last year, the website showed a better performance as its response time was 12 seconds.

In contrast, freetaxusa.com scored the fastest response time – only 3 seconds while last year it was only 1.7 seconds.

Availability (uptime):

As far as availability is concerned, all monitored targets did a good job keeping the uptime above 99%.

Two of them even scored 100%.

In contrast, last year 7 of them demonstrated 100% availability while the lowest uptime was below 98%.

To see more detailed reports by day, please check out the stats below.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco, CA	Chicago, IL	Washington, DC	Avg. resp. time
1	freetaxusa.com	1.768	3.887	3.789	3.148
2	etax.com	7.997	1.343	3.851	4.397
3	taxact.com	6.316	3.934	3.846	4.699
4	fileonline.1040.com	7.806	5.069	2.955	5.277
5	expresstaxrefund.com	10.213	1.606	4.846	5.555
6	turbotax.com	4.885	7.992	4.670	5.849
7	efile.com	11.096	5.275	2.332	6.234
8	taxbrain.com	12.403	5.335	1.930	6.556
9	hrblock.com	8.153	6.666	7.882	7.567
10	esmarttax.com	16.022	7.592	3.738	9.117
11	olt.com	14.279	8.596	11.719	11.531
12	taxslayer.com	29.543	23.075	15.010	22.543

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco, CA	Chicago, IL	Washington, DC	Avg. uptime
1	hrblock.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	taxbrain.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	turbotax.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.980%	99.993%
4	freetaxusa.com	100.000%	99.976%	99.973%	99.983%
5	efile.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.893%	99.964%
6	taxact.com	99.912%	100.000%	99.957%	99.956%
7	fileonline.1040.com	99.963%	100.000%	99.834%	99.932%
8	esmarttax.com	99.938%	99.961%	99.417%	99.772%
9	olt.com	99.766%	99.746%	99.688%	99.734%
10	taxslayer.com	99.574%	99.493%	99.562%	99.543%
11	expresstaxrefund.com	98.951%	99.963%	98.485%	99.133%
12	etax.com	98.941%	99.595%	98.666%	99.068%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
The 2015 Tax Reports reflect a complete web transaction, representative for the End Users' interactions with a website. The reporting period covers the dates between April 04 and April 15, 2015. Performance and availability measurements are made for a typical multi-step web transaction at 15 minute monitoring interval, every day between the hours of 6AM and 3AM EST. Between 3AM and 6AM is the time when a scheduled maintenance most likely will be performed by IT staff and that is why we automatically suspend the monitoring process during this time every day. The WebSitePulse application monitoring service is used to collect data and to create the reports.
The steps in each transaction are comparable for all websites, and reflect the real online user and tax e-filer experience. The simultaneous monitoring is performed from 3 US-based locations of the WebSitePulse monitoring network: San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, and Washington, DC. In case of a detected malfunction or unavailability, the system performs automated error verification from 3 independent resources and only after the above procedure is performed and has returned consistent results, the detected error is confirmed, recorded, and included in the daily performance reports. In these cases, an advanced WebSitePulse exclusive feature comes into play - Forced Monitoring -, which automatically switches to a 3 minute monitoring interval for increased accuracy.

About WebSitePulse:
WebSitePulse is a leading provider of global, independent, and objective availability and performance monitoring of web sites, servers, network components, web applications, e-business- and email round-trip transactions.

Contact:
For more information about this report please contact:
George T., CTO
phone: 1-407-380-1600
email:

Reproduction:
WebSitePulse launched the Performance and Uptime Reports program to keep the general public and the Internet community informed about the performance of spe cific websites and the challenges their webmasters, owners and operators are facing on a daily basis, especially when the web traffic intensifies due to som e special events through the year. Some of the most popular web destinations, related to each particular event, are selected for the purpose of the Reports, and data from their performance measurements is made available on the WebSitePulse public website.

With the intention to broadly disseminate this information for the benefit of the Internet community, we encourage the use of this information without prior approval and under the following Terms and Conditions:

WebSitePulse should be referred as the "Source" of the information;
WebSitePulse should be acknowledged as the owner of the copyrights of the information in the Reports;
The texts of the Reports could be changed or altered to better suit the needs and the style of the publisher without prior notice to WebSitePu lse. However, the integrity and the meaning of the information should be preserved;

The Data from the performance measurements cannot be changed or manipulated and should be used "as is".