Category benchmark · Snapshot 23 October 2026

Accounting & Tax: website readiness

31 configuration checks across 84 Accounting & Tax sites from the SID website catalog, with 41 individual profiles for sites in the Chrome UX Report top 50K.

Sites measured: 84
Median readiness index: 63/100
Profiles: 41
Weakest lane: Recover

Readiness by lane

Enable

78/100

All sites 77

Harden

58/100

All sites 56

Accelerate

58/100

All sites 64

Recover

7/100

All sites 10

Biggest gaps for Accounting & Tax sites

The checks with the most room to improve, weighted by impact.

HSTS kept for at least a year
40% observed · all sites 34%
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.
Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners
security.txt published
9.9% observed · all sites 7.1%
Publish /.well-known/security.txt with at least Contact and Expires fields, as RFC 9116 requires, and review it before it expires.
Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners
CAA records limit who can issue certificates
13% observed · all sites 13%
Publish CAA records naming every CA you actually use, including the CAs your CDN uses for managed certificates. Add an iodef contact if you want reports.
Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners
HTTP/3 advertised
16% observed · all sites 37%
Turn on HTTP/3 at your CDN. Browsers fall back to HTTP/2 automatically, so the risk is low.
Guide: CDN Guide for Website Owners
No render-blocking scripts in <head>
35% observed · all sites 48%
Add defer to scripts that need the DOM, async to independent ones such as analytics, or move them to the end of the body.
Guide: Control Third-Party Scripts Before They Control Your Page
Modern image formats in use
48% observed · all sites 40%
Serve WebP or AVIF with a JPEG or PNG fallback, either through an image CDN or by generating both formats at build time.
Guide: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format

Where Accounting & Tax sites lead

DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject58% observedall sites 39%
Referrer-Policy set42% observedall sites 24%
Framing restricted67% observedall sites 51%
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff59% observedall sites 48%

Stack mix

CDN and edge

Platform or framework

DNS operator

Certificate authority

DigiCert24%
Let's Encrypt23%
Amazon14%
Google Trust Services13%
GlobalSign8.3%
Sectigo8.3%
GoDaddy4.8%
Key-Systems GmbH2.4%

Readiness leaders

Accounting & Tax sites in the top 50K with the highest share of observed practices (at least 26 of 31 checks measured). This lists only what we observed on 23 October 2026; owners can request a correction.

All 31 checks for Accounting & Tax

Check	Lane	Observed	All sites	Measured
HTTP requests move to HTTPS	Harden	92%	91%	77
HSTS kept for at least a year	Harden	40%	34%	83
TLS 1.3 negotiated	Harden	79%	91%	84
Certificate has more than 14 days left	Harden	99%	99%	84
Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less	Harden	38%	67%	84
CAA records limit who can issue certificates	Harden	13%	13%	84
DNSSEC signed	Harden	14%	8%	84
security.txt published	Harden	9.9%	7.1%	81
DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject	Harden	58%	39%	84
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff	Harden	59%	48%	83
Framing restricted	Harden	67%	51%	83
Content Security Policy present	Harden	28%	32%	83
Referrer-Policy set	Harden	42%	24%	83
HTTP/2 negotiated	Accelerate	81%	90%	84
HTTP/3 advertised	Accelerate	16%	37%	83
HTML compressed	Accelerate	89%	93%	83
Static files cached for 30 days or more	Accelerate	49%	51%	74
Modern image formats in use	Accelerate	48%	40%	69
Offscreen images lazy-loaded	Accelerate	55%	62%	66
No render-blocking scripts in <head>	Accelerate	35%	48%	83
robots.txt published	Enable	79%	76%	84
XML sitemap discoverable	Enable	65%	70%	81
Reachable over IPv6	Enable	27%	48%	84
Canonical URL declared	Enable	70%	68%	83
Meta description written	Enable	94%	84%	83
Mobile viewport configured	Enable	99%	94%	83
Structured data present	Enable	54%	51%	83
Social preview image set	Enable	61%	57%	83
Page language declared	Enable	92%	90%	83
At most one redirect to the homepage	Enable	98%	98%	83
Nameservers spread across providers	Recover	7.1%	10%	84

Accounting & Tax profiles

Readiness index shown next to each site.

Accounting & Tax: website readiness

Readiness by lane

Biggest gaps for Accounting & Tax sites

HSTS kept for at least a year

security.txt published

CAA records limit who can issue certificates

HTTP/3 advertised

No render-blocking scripts in <head>

Modern image formats in use