archives.gov

Readiness by lane

Green: archives.gov. Thin bar: Government Services peer median.

Priority fixes for archives.gov

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

1. Priority 1 · Accelerate

   Static files cached for 30 days or more

   Observed: A same-site stylesheet or script was cacheable for 300 seconds, short of the 30-day benchmark.

   Why it matters: Returning visitors and later page views reuse cached files instead of downloading them again.

   What to do: Give versioned (fingerprinted) CSS, JavaScript, fonts and images Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable, and change the file name whenever the content changes.

   30% of Government Services peers do this. Limit: Read from the homepage response only; other pages or regions may send different headers.

   Guide: Browser Caching Guide for Website Owners

2. Priority 2 · Accelerate

   No render-blocking scripts in <head>

   Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 34 external scripts 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.

   39% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: Control Third-Party Scripts Before They Control Your Page

3. Priority 3 · Enable

   Canonical URL declared

   Observed: The homepage did not declare a canonical URL.

   What to do: Add a self-referencing canonical link to every indexable page, using the final https:// URL.

   41% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: Canonical Tags: A Decision Guide for Duplicate URLs

4. Priority 4 · Harden

   Content Security Policy present

   Observed: The homepage response did not include a Content-Security-Policy header.

   What to do: Start with Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only to see what would break, tighten the policy over a few weeks, then enforce it.

   41% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: Payment Security and PCI DSS: What Website Owners Need to Know

What archives.gov already does well

Practices fewer than half of Government Services peers use.

• Structured data presentJSON-LD structured data found.15% of peers
• CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to awstrust.com, entrust.net, letsencrypt.org.17% of peers
• DNSSEC signedDNSSEC delegation (DS record) present.19% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.archives.gov/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Amazon, 197-day validity, expiring 2027-03-25

CDN or edge

Amazon CloudFront

DNS operators

1 self-run or other nameserver domain

HSTS

max-age 365 days, includeSubDomains, preload

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

29 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

1 (jpg 1)

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

Compare with other Government Services sites

• cbp.gov75
• hdb.gov.sg75
• sars.gov.za76
• vietnam.vn77
• wbxpress.com76

Government Services readiness benchmark