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Performance Tracking  > 2015 Tax Websites  > Introduction

WebSitePulse 2015 Tax Performance and Uptime Report


Tax season has officially started and it will continue until April 15th, 2015.

With every year, tax e-filing is gaining popularity as more taxpayers find it easier and faster than having to physically visit a tax refund office.

Filing your taxes online, however, hides its pitfalls. Taxpayers become a preferred target for cyber criminals during tax season who aim at stealing their personal identity and refunds. That is why being extra alert when choosing a tax refund website is a must as cybercriminals come up with a variety of ways to trick you into filling out your personal details on a fraudulent website.

Another problem that may arise with the e-filing is the performance and availability of the tax refund websites. If the chosen website is not prepared to deal with heavy traffic load, it might slow down your process or it might freeze during a crucial stage of the e-filing. As a result, you may fail to submit your tax refund or you may lose all the information you have been filling out for hours.

As a monitoring company, we decided to monitor precisely the response time and uptime of 12 of the most popular tax refund websites during the last 10 days of the tax filing season – April 4th until April 15th. We will report their daily statistics and see whether these websites are ready to handle the heavy traffic flow.

See details of the monitoring process below.

Performance Reports

The most important metrics for the availability and reliability of any e-process are website response time and website uptime, which is why WebSitePulse performance reports focus on those two.

The reports reflect not only the tax websites’ home pages performance, but any web transaction process as well. To be specific, measurements of e-transactions are made every 15 minutes, from 3 different monitoring locations in the U.S. Also, to ensure the accuracy of the monitoring recordings, we use false alarm prevention system and error verification controls. The tax-return websites response and uptime reports will be published after April 5th, 2015, where you can find information on uptime, performance and availability.