The US presidential election is certainly heating up. With Election Day on November 6 approaching fast and the television debates on schedule, we thought we would take a look at how the candidates are doing in terms of their web presence. Put in another way, who is winning the race so far, when it comes to website performance and uptime?
Website uptime
To limit this study a bit, we decided to only look at how the websites have fared in October so far. That said, we will probably at some later date take a look at a longer time period.
During October so far, both Barackobama.com and Gop.com scored a perfect 100% perfect uptime.
Democrats.org had a total of 59 minutes of downtime spread out over five interruptions on October 7, resulting in 99.72% uptime so far in October.
Mittromney.com had only a 3-minute downtime on October 10, resulting in 99.99% uptime so far this month.
Website performance
So, none of the sites have been struck by any single major outage, but what about performance? Even if a site is not down, if it runs slow it may still drive away potential visitors. Here’s how the sites did in October so far in terms of performance.
As you can see, between the two candidates, Mittromney.com is significantly faster than Barackobama.com. It might be worth noting, that on the Republican side, the candidate’s site is much faster than the party’s site. On the Democratic side, however, the roles are reversed, with the party’s site loading faster than the candidate’s.
We should point out that none of the four sites exhibited any noticeable slowdowns in association with important events so far, like conventions, and TV debates. Nor was there any downtime in relation to these events.
Can web performance predict the election results?
If you just go by website response time, Mitt Romney is the clear winner (although the poor performance of Gop.com doesn’t exactly help him). However, that is hardly any predictor for the actual outcome in November.
We will continue to monitor the sites relevant to the US presidential election and report back to you about how things develop.
You can follow how the websites of candidates and their parties are doing on our public reports page at png.dm/uselections12.
Image (top) via Shutterstock.
