Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026

abcnews.com

abcnews.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.

Readiness index: 46/100
Ahead of: 3.1%
Practices observed: 11/28
Popularity band: Top 5K

Measured 2026-10-23 11:26:54 UTC from one location. How we measure

Readiness by lane

Green: abcnews.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Enable

79/100

Peers 89

Harden

27/100

Peers 56

Accelerate

44/100

Peers 68

Recover

0/100

Peers 11

Priority fixes for abcnews.com

Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.

Priority 1 · Enable
XML sitemap discoverable
Observed: No sitemap was listed in robots.txt or found at /sitemap.xml.
Why it matters: A sitemap helps search engines find new and updated pages, especially on large or frequently updated sites.
What to do: Generate an XML sitemap of canonical URLs, reference it in robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console.
87% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Only the standard location was requested, once, at the time of the check.
Guide: XML Sitemap Guide: Include Only URLs You Stand Behind
Priority 2 · Harden
HSTS kept for at least a year
Observed: The homepage response did not include a Strict-Transport-Security header.
What to do: Send Strict-Transport-Security on HTTPS responses. Start with a short max-age (for example 300 seconds), confirm every subdomain works over HTTPS, then raise it in steps to 31536000. Add includeSubDomains only when all subdomains are HTTPS. HSTS preload is optional and hard to undo; hstspreload.org itself does not recommend it by default.
On Amazon CloudFront: Attach a response headers policy with Strict-Transport-Security to each distribution.
35% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners
Priority 3 · Accelerate
Modern image formats in use
Observed: The homepage had 108 images and none used WebP or AVIF.
What to do: Serve WebP or AVIF with a JPEG or PNG fallback, either through an image CDN or by generating both formats at build time.
44% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format
Priority 4 · Harden
DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
Observed: The DMARC policy for abcnews.com was p=none, which asks receivers to take no action on failing mail.
What to do: Publish DMARC with p=none and a reporting address first, fix any legitimate senders that fail SPF or DKIM alignment, then move to quarantine and finally reject.
37% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

What we saw

Homepage checked: https://abcnews.com/
Homepage response: HTTP 200
TLS: TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
Certificate: Amazon, 394-day validity, expiring 2026-12-02
CDN or edge: Amazon CloudFront
DNS operators: Amazon Route 53
DMARC policy: p=none
Homepage HTML: 784 KB, gzip
Images on homepage: 108 (jpg 526, svg 10)

Limits: homepage only, one location, one moment. Header checks reflect the homepage response; other pages may differ.

Stack and providers

Seen in the homepage response, certificate and DNS. Provider pages compare how their customers configure the same checks.

Amazon CloudFront (cdn and edge platform)Amazon Route 53 (dns operator)Amazon (certificate authority)Service guide: AWS (Amazon Web Services)

All 31 checks

Select a gap for the method and fix. How each check works

Not observed 17

Observed 11

TLS 1.3 negotiated
Certificate has more than 14 days left
HTTP/2 negotiated
HTML compressed
Canonical URL declared
Meta description written
Mobile viewport configured
Structured data present
Social preview image set
Page language declared
At most one redirect to the homepage

Not measured 3

HTTP requests move to HTTPS
Static files cached for 30 days or more
robots.txt published

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Live status for this site: Status Is Down: abcnews.com. This profile covers configuration only.

Compare with other News & Media sites

News & Media readiness benchmark