Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
ahrefs.com
ahrefs.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 87 SEO & Email Marketing sites.
- Readiness index
- 86/100
- Ahead of
- 93%
- Practices observed
- 26/31
- Popularity band
- Top 50K
SEO & Email Marketing median 62
of measured SEO & Email Marketing sites
0 of 31 could not be measured
Chrome UX Report top-sites list
Readiness by lane
Green: ahrefs.com. Thin bar: SEO & Email Marketing peer median.
Enable
100/100
Peers 77
Harden
89/100
Peers 55
Accelerate
73/100
Peers 66
Recover
0/100
Peers 3
Priority fixes for ahrefs.com
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Accelerate
Modern image formats in use
Observed: The homepage had 110 images and none used WebP or AVIF.
Why it matters: WebP and AVIF are typically much smaller than JPEG or PNG at similar quality, and images are often the heaviest part of a page.
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.
On Cloudflare: Cloudflare Polish can convert images to WebP.
41% of SEO & Email Marketing peers do this. Limit: Based on the homepage HTML delivered to an automated client; scripts that run later were not executed.
Guide: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format
Priority 2 · Accelerate
No render-blocking scripts in <head>
Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 1 external script without async or defer.
What to do: Add defer to scripts that need the DOM, async to independent ones such as analytics, or move them to the end of the body.
56% of SEO & Email Marketing peers do this.
Guide: Control Third-Party Scripts Before They Control Your Page
Priority 3 · Harden
security.txt published
Observed: No valid /.well-known/security.txt with a Contact field was returned.
What to do: Publish /.well-known/security.txt with at least Contact and Expires fields, as RFC 9116 requires, and review it before it expires.
On Cloudflare: Cloudflare Security Center can serve a security.txt file for the zone.
8.4% of SEO & Email Marketing peers do this.
Priority 4 · Harden
DNSSEC signed
Observed: No DS record was found for ahrefs.com at its parent zone, so its DNS answers are not DNSSEC-signed.
What to do: Enable DNSSEC at your DNS provider, then add the DS record at your registrar. Plan provider moves carefully: a stale DS record can make the domain fail to resolve.
On Cloudflare: Enable DNSSEC in DNS > Settings and add the DS record at the registrar.
4.6% of SEO & Email Marketing peers do this.
Guide: Website Uptime Readiness: Prepare Before Traffic Arrives
What ahrefs.com already does well
Practices fewer than half of SEO & Email Marketing peers use.
- CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to comodoca.com, digicert.com, letsencrypt.org and others.20% of peers
- Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.20% of peers
- Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.27% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://ahrefs.com/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- Google Trust Services, 90-day validity, expiring 2026-12-18
- CDN or edge
- Cloudflare
- DNS operators
- Cloudflare
- HSTS
- max-age 365 days, includeSubDomains, preload
- DMARC policy
- p=quarantine
- Homepage HTML
- 1,251 KB, gzip
- Images on homepage
- 110 (svg 294, jpg 15, png 11)
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.
All 31 checks
Select a gap for the method and fix. How each check works
Not observed 5
Observed 26
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- HSTS kept for at least a year
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less
- CAA records limit who can issue certificates
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
- Framing restricted
- Content Security Policy present
- Referrer-Policy set
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- HTTP/3 advertised
- HTML compressed
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
- robots.txt published
- XML sitemap discoverable
- Reachable over IPv6
- 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
Own ahrefs.com?
Re-run the checks after a change, or verify the site in a free workspace to save reports with history, compare against similar sites and competitors, and track a private action plan. What owners get.
Live status for this site: Status Is Down: ahrefs.com. This profile covers configuration only.