Presidential Election Website Performance and Uptime: As the Nov. 6, 2012 Election Day nears the two presidential hopefuls are in a close standoff. This year, even more than in years past a candidate’s website plays an important role in presenting the candidate’s views, and as a tool for fundraising.
Dotcom-Monitor has been tracking both candidates’ websites MittRomney.com and BarackObama.com for uptime and performance. After all, if the candidate’s website isn’t up, or isn’t performing well it neither presents the candidates views, nor raises funds. We monitored both sites in 15-minute increments from eight USA-only locations using Internet Explorer, non-cached, starting on October 26th 2:30 pm CST. We present our presidential election website performance findings to-date here on Oct. 30, 2012. We will provide updates on the websites’ performance over the next few days as the race continues to intensify.
Presidential Website Performance
Based on both candidates site this past week, Barack Obama’s website response time is averaging 10.7851 seconds, compared to Mitt Romney’s who is averaging 3.6361 seconds. As you can see below, MittRomney.com (blue line) is significantly faster than BarackObama.com (orange line) a majority of the measured period.
During the testing period Mitt Romney’s site had its slowest response time at and 6:00 pm (18:00 hours, green bar) 10:00 pm (22:00 hours, red bar) EST–Eastern Standard Time with response times of 6.91 seconds, and 6.43 seconds respectively.
While Barack Obama’s site had its slowest response time of 19.52 seconds at 12:00 am (0:00 hour, orange bar) EST –Eastern Standard Time followed by 15.45 seconds at 3:00 am (3:00 hour, green bar) EST–Eastern Standard Time
Some of the reasons that might have slowed Barrack Obama’s website are the following:
Barack Obama’s website had significantly more page elements (210) to Mitt Romney’s (24). Barack Obama also has significantly more third-party hosts than Mitt Romney (Obama at 52 compared to Romney at 4).
| Sum of DNS times in ms | 10820 |
| Sum of Connection times in ms | 3231 |
| Sum of SSL times in ms | 1475 |
| Sum of Request times in ms | 15 |
| Sum of First Packet times in ms | 7067 |
| Sum of Download times in ms | 40607 |
Device Reporting
For Barrack Obama’s website the slowest device response time for the eight USA locations tested were being recorded at our Amazon East (red line) location. For all periods the response time at this location was trending to show significant delays.
While Mitt Romney’s website had the slowest device response time at the eight locations tested were being recorded at our New York (purple line) location.
Presidential Website Uptime
For the week of October 26th through October 29th, both BarackObama.com and MittRomney.com scored a perfect 100% uptime in our Presidential Election Website Performance test. Interest in both sites is expected to continue to ramp up in the next week, therefore it is imperative that both sites remain available.
To detect performance problems, slow/missing elements, or connectivity issues for your own site, click the button below:
– Presidential Election Website Performance and Uptime – Romney vs Obama –
