Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
aol.com
aol.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 83/100
- Ahead of
- 95%
- Practices observed
- 23/30
- Popularity band
- Top 5K
News & Media median 68
of measured News & Media sites
1 of 31 could not be measured
Chrome UX Report top-sites list
Readiness by lane
Green: aol.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
82/100
Peers 89
Harden
85/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
85/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for aol.com
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Enable
Canonical URL declared
Observed: The homepage did not declare a canonical URL.
Why it matters: A canonical link tells search engines which URL to show when the same page is reachable at several addresses.
What to do: Add a self-referencing canonical link to every indexable page, using the final https:// URL.
89% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Based on the homepage HTML delivered to an automated client; scripts that run later were not executed.
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.
On Next.js: Use the next/script component with an appropriate loading strategy.
42% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: Control Third-Party Scripts Before They Control Your Page
Priority 3 · Enable
Structured data present
Observed: The homepage had no JSON-LD structured data.
What to do: Add JSON-LD for your organization and main content types, then test it with Google's Rich Results Test.
76% of News & Media peers do this.
Priority 4 · Harden
Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less
Observed: The certificate from Amazon had a 197-day validity period, longer than the 100-day maximum that applies from March 2027.
What to do: Move to automated issuance and renewal now, while you still have time to test it.
66% of News & Media peers do this.
What aol.com already does well
Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.
- security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.6.2% of peers
- CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to amazon.com, amazonaws.com, amazontrust.com and others.13% of peers
- Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.22% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://www.aol.com/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- Amazon, 197-day validity, expiring 2027-03-10
- CDN or edge
- Amazon CloudFront
- Platform or framework
- Next.js
- DNS operators
- Amazon Route 53
- HSTS
- max-age 365 days
- DMARC policy
- p=reject
- Homepage HTML
- 1,431 KB, gzip
- Images on homepage
- 259 (jpg 101, png 48, svg 7)
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 7
Observed 23
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- HSTS kept for at least a year
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- CAA records limit who can issue certificates
- security.txt published
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
- Framing restricted
- Referrer-Policy set
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- HTTP/3 advertised
- HTML compressed
- Modern image formats in use
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
- robots.txt published
- XML sitemap discoverable
- Reachable over IPv6
- Meta description written
- Mobile viewport configured
- Social preview image set
- Page language declared
- At most one redirect to the homepage
Not measured 1
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
Own aol.com?
Re-run the checks after a change, keep a private action plan in a free workspace, or report a mistake.
Live status for this site: Status Is Down: aol.com. This profile covers configuration only.