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Websitepulse 2023 Tax Performance & Uptime Report Summary


The filing deadline to submit last year's tax returns or an extension to file and pay the tax owed is now behind us. Taxpayers who missed the final date and are requesting an extension will have until Thursday, June 15th, 2023, to file their federal income tax returns.

On April 18th, we completed our 2023 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 whole 2023 tax season.

We found that all monitored websites' daily average response time was 9.307 sec., which is almost 0.5 sec. slower than last year. The daily average responses by location are as follows:
  • Washington DC (US East Coast) – 6.055 sec
  • San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 12.334 sec
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 9.516 sec
This year the speed leader among the monitored websites was freetaxusa.com, with an average response time of 3.309 seconds, followed by expresstaxrefund.com (3.684 sec) and fileonline.1040.com (4.270 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table for the fifth year in a row was olt.com, with 22.257 sec. average response time, which probably frustrated most of its users.

Compared to the last year's performance, the three leaders increased their response time by an average of 0.8 seconds, and the slowest site this year performed an average of 1.158 seconds slower than in the 2022 tax season.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 12 websites for the 2023 tax season was 99.74%. The daily average uptime by location is as follows:
  • Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.956%
  • San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.942%
  • Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.327%
This year's availability champion with 100% average uptime is expresstaxrefund.com, followed by freetaxusa.com and fileonline.1040.com (both with 99.995%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands olt.com with 97.773%, meaning they were offline for a little over 8 hours for the entire monitored period.

Average Response times for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. resp. time
1freetaxusa.com3.9712.9433.0143.309
2expresstaxrefund.com6.5892.3072.1563.684
3fileonline.1040.com6.2613.1803.3684.270
4etax.com8.5652.9572.0644.529
5esmarttax.com7.78810.0014.0767.288
6taxact.com13.2175.8213.9357.657
7taxslayer.com10.3076.8746.4057.862
8hrblock.com10.58810.7224.9458.752
9libertytax.com6.54123.9475.43611.975
10efile.com26.84911.1985.22014.422
11turbotax.com19.18319.3978.48515.688
12olt.com28.19314.97923.59822.257

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetSan Francisco, CAChicago, ILWashington, DCAvg. uptime
1expresstaxrefund.com100.000%100.000%100.000%100.000%
2freetaxusa.com99.985%100.000%100.000%99.995%
3fileonline.1040.com99.985%100.000%100.000%99.995%
4etax.com99.965%100.000%100.000%99.988%
5hrblock.com100.000%99.985%99.970%99.985%
6turbotax.com99.983%99.984%99.987%99.984%
7taxact.com99.983%99.970%100.000%99.984%
8esmarttax.com100.000%99.881%99.987%99.956%
9libertytax.com99.969%99.619%99.970%99.853%
10taxslayer.com99.810%99.828%99.751%99.796%
11efile.com99.653%99.867%99.865%99.795%
12olt.com100.000%93.335%99.985%97.773%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
The 2023 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".