Now that the 2024 tax season is over, taxpayers are taking a moment to think about all the forms and deadlines they had to deal with during that time. For taxpayers who need an extension of time to file their taxes, there are several options to get an automatic extension through October 15th, 2024. Although an extension grants extra time to file, it does not extend the obligation to pay taxes due on April 15th, 2024.

On April 18th, we completed our 2024 Tax Season Report. We measured the performance of the twelve most popular tax websites' home pages and a complete web transaction representative for the end user's interactions with the websites.

The report measures Uptime and Response Time as the most critical metrics for any web- based operation's availability and reliability, which are vital to 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 most of the monitored tax websites demonstrated their preparedness to meet the challenges of the expected heavier web traffic during the 2024 tax season.

We found that all monitored websites' daily average response time was 10.172 sec., 0.865 sec. slower than last year. The daily average responses by location are as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) - 7.939 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) - 14.086 sec
• Chicago, IL (US Central) - 10.108 sec

This year, the speed leader among the monitored websites was expresstaxrefund.com, with an average response time of 2.681 seconds, followed by etax.com (3.705 sec) and fileonline.1040.com (4.313 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table for the sixth year was olt.com, with 21.802 sec. average response time, which probably frustrated most of its users. Compared to last year's performance, the three leaders increased their response time by an average of 0.188 seconds, and the slowest site this year performed an average of 0.455 seconds faster than in the 2023 tax season.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 10 websites for the 2024 tax season was 99.705%. The daily average uptime by location is as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) - 99.899%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) - 99.282%
• Chicago, IL (US Central) - 99.934%

This year's availability champion with 100% average uptime is etax.com, followed by taxslayer.com (99.999%) and expresstaxrefund.com (99.985%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands olt.com with 98.272%, meaning they were offline for over 6 hours for the entire monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco, CA	Chicago, IL	Washington, DC	Avg. resp. time
1	expresstaxrefund.com	3.839	1.922	2.281	2.681
2	etax.com	6.153	2.696	2.267	3.705
3	fileonline.1040.com	4.456	4.142	4.342	4.313
4	taxact.com	8.370	4.821	4.511	5.900
5	hrblock.com	9.686	11.951	5.973	9.204
6	taxslayer.com	11.968	10.803	10.453	11.074
7	libertytax.com	20.896	12.436	8.817	14.050
8	turbotax.com	17.435	23.381	9.448	16.755
9	efile.com	31.384	13.447	8.039	17.623
10	olt.com	26.671	15.478	23.256	21.802

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	taxslayer.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.987%	99.996%
3	expresstaxrefund.com	99.969%	100.000%	99.985%	99.985%
4	taxact.com	99.967%	99.983%	100.000%	99.983%
5	fileonline.1040.com	99.888%	99.918%	99.826%	99.877%
6	hrblock.com	99.571%	99.985%	99.986%	99.847%
7	libertytax.com	99.878%	99.983%	99.541%	99.801%
8	turbotax.com	99.430%	99.687%	99.889%	99.669%
9	efile.com	99.280%	99.814%	99.770%	99.621%
10	olt.com	94.835%	99.981%	100.000%	98.272%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
The 2024 Tax Reports reflect a complete web transaction, representative for the End Users' interactions with a website. The reporting period covers the dates between April 05 and April 19, 2023. 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".