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Websitepulse 2016 Tax Performance & Uptime Report Summary


With the end of the tax season, we have finished our tax season report for 2016.

For the purpose of this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measures not only the performance of the websites home pages, but typically measures a complete web transaction representative for the End Users' interactions with a website. The Reports 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.

The overall performance of the monitored tax websites demonstrated their preparedness to meet the challenges of the expected increase in web traffic near the end of the 2016 tax season.

freetaxusa.com lead the speed chart again for second year with avg. response time of 2.373 seconds, which is a quite good result and far away from the bottom of the chart where we find taxslayer with avg. response time of 22.1 seconds.

In contrast of the last year, freetaxusa.com is at the top of the uptime chart too with total availability of 99.996%. The second place goes for expresstaxrefund.com which is almost the same as freetaxusa.com. The bottom of availability chart goes to olt.com with 98.585% which is not bad, but at least not competitive result too.

To see the detailed daily reports, see below.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. resp. time
1freetaxusa.com1.2512.6772.9602.296
2etax.com9.4322.8831.1064.474
3taxact.com5.7853.7304.0834.533
4expresstaxrefund.com10.9303.5071.3525.263
5efile.com11.9745.6672.2886.643
6fileonline.1040.com11.1566.3213.1676.881
7turbotax.com15.1754.2344.8158.075
8hrblock.com10.1106.4809.4068.665
9libertytax.com16.1486.7005.2279.358
10olt.com12.8417.58310.96410.463
11esmarttax.com20.4868.3936.91411.931
12taxslayer.com38.34519.4598.74522.183

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. uptime
1etax.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2freetaxusa.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
3expresstaxrefund.com99.981%100.000%100.000%99.994%
4taxact.com99.961%99.981%100.000%99.981%
5esmarttax.com99.927%99.943%99.882%99.917%
6fileonline.1040.com99.827%99.921%99.980%99.909%
7libertytax.com99.916%99.850%99.917%99.895%
8turbotax.com99.170%100.000%100.000%99.723%
9efile.com99.664%99.552%99.561%99.592%
10taxslayer.com99.148%99.221%99.203%99.191%
11olt.com99.608%98.847%98.978%99.145%
12hrblock.com98.798%98.840%98.804%98.814%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
The 2016 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, 2016. 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:

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