autotrader.com

Readiness by lane

Green: autotrader.com. Thin bar: Cars & Automotive peer median.

Priority fixes for autotrader.com

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

1. Priority 1 · Harden

   HTTP requests move to HTTPS

   Observed: A request to http://www.autotrader.com/ was not redirected to HTTPS.

   Why it matters: Visitors who type the address or follow an old link start on unencrypted HTTP. A redirect moves them to the encrypted site before any cookies or form data are sent.

   What to do: Add a permanent (301 or 308) redirect from every http:// URL to the same https:// URL at your CDN, load balancer or web server.

   95% of Cars & Automotive peers do this. Limit: Measured for the homepage only, from one location, at the time of the check.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

2. Priority 2 · Accelerate

   HTML compressed

   Observed: The homepage HTML (4 KB) was delivered without gzip, Brotli or zstd compression.

   What to do: Enable Brotli or gzip for text responses (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, SVG) at the CDN or origin.

   95% of Cars & Automotive peers do this.

   Guide: How to Set a Website Performance Budget That Teams Can Keep

3. Priority 3 · Enable

   XML sitemap discoverable

   Observed: No sitemap was listed in robots.txt or found at /sitemap.xml.

   What to do: Generate an XML sitemap of canonical URLs, reference it in robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console.

   83% of Cars & Automotive peers do this.

   Guide: XML Sitemap Guide: Include Only URLs You Stand Behind

4. Priority 4 · 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.

   41% of Cars & Automotive peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

What autotrader.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of Cars & Automotive peers use.

• DNSSEC signedDNSSEC delegation (DS record) present.8.3% of peers
• Nameservers spread across providersNameservers spread across more than one operator.14% of peers
• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=reject.41% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.autotrader.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2026-12-22

CDN or edge

Akamai

DNS operators

Vercara UltraDNS, plus 2 self-run or other nameserver domains

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

4 KB, uncompressed

Images on homepage

2 (png 2)

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 Cars & Automotive sites

• byd.com45
• clever-tanken.de47
• denza.com45
• nomerogram.ru46
• vezess.hu47

Cars & Automotive readiness benchmark