Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 70/100
- Ahead of
- 58%
- Practices observed
- 19/30
- Popularity band
- Top 50K
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: arstechnica.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
95/100
Peers 89
Harden
55/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
74/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for arstechnica.com
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Harden
TLS 1.3 negotiated
Observed: The TLS connection negotiated TLSv1.2.
Why it matters: TLS 1.3 removes legacy cipher suites and completes the handshake in fewer round trips, so it is both safer and faster for new connections.
What to do: Enable TLS 1.3 on your CDN or server. Keep TLS 1.2 available for older clients unless you have checked your audience.
93% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Certificate and protocol were observed from one vantage point; CDNs can present different certificates by region.
Priority 2 · Harden
HSTS kept for at least a year
Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 30 days, below the one-year benchmark.
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.
35% of News & Media peers do this.
Priority 3 · 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 WordPress: Since WordPress 6.3, scripts can be registered with a defer or async loading strategy.
42% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: Control Third-Party Scripts Before They Control Your Page
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 arstechnica.com already does well
Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.
- Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.29% of peers
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=reject.37% of peers
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniffnosniff header present.42% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://arstechnica.com/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.2, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- Amazon, 197-day validity, expiring 2027-01-08
- Platform or framework
- WordPress
- DNS operators
- Amazon Route 53
- HSTS
- max-age 30 days
- DMARC policy
- p=reject
- Homepage HTML
- 345 KB, br
- Images on homepage
- 61 (jpg 260, png 21, webp 20)
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 11
Observed 19
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
- Framing restricted
- Content Security Policy present
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- HTML compressed
- Modern image formats in use
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
- robots.txt published
- XML sitemap discoverable
- 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 1
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
Own arstechnica.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: arstechnica.com. This profile covers configuration only.