cao.ac.za

Readiness by lane

Green: cao.ac.za. Thin bar: Education & Online Learning peer median.

Priority fixes for cao.ac.za

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.cao.ac.za/ 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.

   92% of Education & Online Learning 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 (91 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.

   90% of Education & Online Learning peers do this.

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

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   TLS 1.3 negotiated

   Observed: The TLS connection negotiated TLSv1.2.

   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.

   86% of Education & Online Learning peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

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.

   34% of Education & Online Learning peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

What cao.ac.za already does well

Practices fewer than half of Education & Online Learning peers use.

• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=quarantine.36% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.cao.ac.za/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.2, HTTP/2

Certificate

Sectigo, 365-day validity, expiring 2027-03-10

DNS operators

1 self-run or other nameserver domain

DMARC policy

p=quarantine

Homepage HTML

91 KB, uncompressed

Images on homepage

28 (png 16, gif 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 Education & Online Learning sites

• airmantest.com27
• ausexamination.ac.in28
• braouonline.in27
• buhs.ac.in28
• du.ac.in29

Education & Online Learning readiness benchmark