Healthcare.gov Errors Now BELOW 1%

[FarCenter]

5. US Healthcare.gov demonstrates lack of basic website optimisation

The problematic US Healthcare.gov website appears to fail the most fundamental of performance optimisation tests, an analysis has found.

Healthcare.gov, a key piece of the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as 'Obamacare', is a website from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that allows uninsured US citizens to shop for new health insurance plans. However, the $630 million website has been plagued with problems since its launch on 1 October 2013, including outages, slow page loads and users not being able to complete applications.

Over a month since the website's launch, an analysis by application performance company Compuware has found that standard website design optimisation practices, that have been around for years, have still not been applied. This leads to too much content being downloaded by the site, which continues to slow it down.

In the most simple example, the homepage hosts a large background image which Compuware was able to compress by more than 70 percent without affecting the quality.

"It is this 'blurry' background image that is 350KB in size. I downloaded it, opened and re-saved without losing any quality with my free Paint.NET program. Now the size is 99KB - that's a reduction of more than 70 percent," Andreas Grabner, technology strategist for Compuware and lead of the Compuware APM Centre of Excellence team, wrote in a blog.

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=9897D888-B606-1B65-6703B1AED071B638

http://www.compuware.com/en_us/application-performance-management/health-care-dot-gov.html