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Government websites are a gateway to many services that help the public. However, it has recently been highlighted that the websites are not known for their reliability.
People are concerned about accessing important services throughout busy periods.
Having stated that, improvement seems to be on its way. The UK are getting better, despite it being a relatively bumpy transition, where public services online are concerned.
In particular, Cheshire has proven itself to be top of the class as far as the reliability of their governmental website is concerned.
Status Cake
As reported by StatusCake, who carried out the test, researchers tested over 2,500 .gov.uk domain names. They measured each address for uptime and performance.
In other words, to see how fast pages loaded, and how often users were faced with time-outs, when the website essentially just gives up trying to load.
Using a specially built cheat sheet, they were able to convert these uptime percentages into a more human-friendly format of days, hours, minutes, seconds.
This makes the data a lot easier to understand for the average person and helps to put it in a new perspective.
Over the period the researchers were interested in, they found that the average uptime for the domains they examined was 97.12%.
This figure sounds like a triumph, after all, it means the website is available over 97% of the time. However, that also represents 20 hours of downtime over the course of a month.
That’s almost an entire day’s worth of time where the website cannot be used.
Most web hosts today are advertising 99% uptime at the minimum, which does beg the question of what the government’s backroom infrastructure actually looks like.
Cheshire councils, however, were amongst only a handful who scored 100% uptime!
Measuring Performance
In order to gain accurate data from their research, StatusCake ran a series of tests, involving a simple connection to the website in question, and confirmation that a response has been received, over a short period of time.
They did this over the course of a month, recording how often websites were available and how often they could not be loaded.
Compiling all of their data at the end of the research, StatusCake have been able to offer a more detailed and informed glimpse into how well councils are serving their constituents in making online services available.
Many people turn to government websites to find important forms, to get emergency help and advice, and a host of other uses that are an essential part of what councils do.
The lower-than-standard uptimes are puzzling, given that even the cheapest hosting package that you or I could buy would offer a 99% uptime guarantee.
The Winners
The good news is that some government websites did perform very well in the tests. For example, eatsafe.gov.uk weren’t just available 100% of the time, they were also the fastest loading website tested.
This is good news, given that their role is becoming more important every year!
At least the people of Cheshire can rest easy, knowing that they have easy access to their council website when they need it.
However, underneath is a serious issue that needs addressing, especially as we transition to a paperless world.
