Healthcare.gov One Year Website Speed Test and Performance Review

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Nov. 19, 2014 - PRLog -- After one year of improvements, how fast is the healthcare.gov website? While the site is more available, response times have slowed down by 62% to 78% over the past year. We offer some triaged recommendations to improve the speed of healthcare.gov.

Millions of Americans wanting to enroll in Obamacare use the healthcare.gov official website. Just over one year ago, health care consumers were directed to log on to the healthcare.gov website starting on October 1, 2013. The healthcare.gov website experienced growing pains after its initial launch. Starting November 15, 2014 citizens were directed to the healthcare.gov website to enroll or reapply to avoid penalties for not having "minimum essential coverage." This article compares the website performance of healthcare.gov one year later. How does the popular site fare after one year of improvements?

See the full Healthcare.gov One Year Performance Review here.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/healthcare-gov-performance-2014/

The home page has grown to 1.23MB requiring 113 requests. This is smaller than the average top 1000 page size (1807K) and about the same as the average number of objects (114, source httparchive.org). Here are the issues with the new healthcare.gov website (many of which are still there from one year ago):

* MINIMIZE HTTP REQUESTS: Too many HTTP requests 109 load/113 fully loaded
* IMPOVE CACHING: Poor caching 7/100 no max-age or expires headers
* LOAD CSS EARLY: JavaScript loads before CSS files (can block rendering)
( OPTIMIZE IMAGES: Unoptimized images (home.png main banner = 471K, optimized is 26K JPEG
* COMBINE JS/CSS FILES: 14 JS/CSS files before onload
* MINIMIZE WEB FONT USE: 11 webfont-related files
* AVOID REDIRECTS: 16 redirects, 1 404
* USE CSS SPRITES: 7 requests could be saved combining images into a CSS sprite
* USE DEFLATE COMPRESSION: GZIP compession could save 42K on home page html (more for other/external files)
* DEFER PARSING of JS (345K parsed during load)
* LOCALIZE EXTERNAL FILES: 78 external requests with associated delays
* MINIFY JAVASCRIPT: Unminified JS (minify JS 32.9K saved)
* IMPROVE TTFB: Slow TTFB 0.847S
* AVOID SSL OVERHEAD: SSL overhead on over 50 objects

Conclusion

While the healthcare.gov website has improved in availability and consistency, performance problems remain one year later. Healthcare.gov home page response times have slowed down by 62% to 78%, while page size and complexity have grown by 85% to 172% over the past year. We offer some triaged recommendations to improve the speed of healthcare.gov.

See the full Healthcare.gov One Year Performance Review here:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/healthcare...

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