The 2017 tax season just ended on April 18th and we have finished monitoring 12 of the most popular tax filing websites for our 2017 Tax Season Report.

For the purpose of this Performance Report, WebSitePulse as usual measures not only the performance of the websites home pages, but measures a complete web transaction representative for the end users' interactions with a website as well.

The report measures Uptime and Response Time as the most important metrics for the availability and the reliability of any web-based operation, critical for the end users' overall online experience. Measurements of the multi-step online transactions are made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 3 different monitoring locations: Washington DC (US East Coast), San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) and Chicago, IL (US Central).

The overall performance of the monitored tax websites demonstrated their preparedness to meet the challenges of the expected heavy web traffic during the whole 2017 tax season.

We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 11.136 sec. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 8.98 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 15.872 sec
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 8.557 sec

Once again freetaxusa.com lead the speed chart for the third year in a row with an average response time of 3.931 seconds, followed by fileonline.1040.com (4.135 sec) and expresstaxrefund.com (5.825 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was olt.com with 30.703 seconds average response time which surely frustrated many of their users.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 12 websites for 2017 tax season was 99.741%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.439%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.904%
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.883%

We have three winners with 100% average uptime for this year’s tax season and they are taxact.com, etax.com and hrblock.com, followed by olt.com (99.994%) and expresstaxrefund.com (99.989%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands turbotax.com with 98.155% which leaves them with a room for improvements.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco, CA	Chicago, IL	Washington, DC	Avg. resp. time
1	freetaxusa.com	2.981	3.406	5.405	3.931
2	fileonline.1040.com	4.849	4.986	2.571	4.135
3	expresstaxrefund.com	12.234	3.888	1.353	5.825
4	taxact.com	5.812	5.804	7.077	6.231
5	etax.com	14.038	4.245	1.416	6.566
6	efile.com	14.548	6.961	3.268	8.259
7	libertytax.com	18.921	8.528	6.971	11.473
8	turbotax.com	11.839	5.779	18.595	12.071
9	hrblock.com	12.607	12.442	12.244	12.431
10	esmarttax.com	22.537	10.476	8.828	13.947
11	taxslayer.com	31.542	15.266	7.382	18.063
12	olt.com	38.556	20.909	32.643	30.703

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco, CA	Chicago, IL	Washington, DC	Avg. uptime
1	etax.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	taxact.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	hrblock.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
4	olt.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.983%	99.994%
5	expresstaxrefund.com	99.966%	100.000%	100.000%	99.989%
6	fileonline.1040.com	99.985%	99.911%	100.000%	99.965%
7	efile.com	99.908%	99.837%	99.916%	99.887%
8	esmarttax.com	99.875%	99.869%	99.847%	99.864%
9	freetaxusa.com	99.838%	99.834%	99.836%	99.836%
10	libertytax.com	99.852%	99.884%	99.704%	99.813%
11	taxslayer.com	99.415%	99.246%	99.527%	99.396%
12	turbotax.com	100.000%	100.000%	94.464%	98.155%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
The 2017 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, 2017. 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".