Category benchmark · Snapshot 23 October 2026

Forums & Communities: website readiness

31 configuration checks across 377 Forums & Communities sites from the SID website catalog, with 222 individual profiles for sites in the Chrome UX Report top 50K.

Sites measured: 377
Median readiness index: 62/100
Profiles: 222
Weakest lane: Recover

Readiness by lane

Enable

74/100

All sites 77

Harden

54/100

All sites 56

Accelerate

60/100

All sites 64

Recover

7/100

All sites 10

Biggest gaps for Forums & Communities sites

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

HSTS kept for at least a year
28% 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
Modern image formats in use
30% 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
DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
31% observed · all sites 39%
Publish DMARC with p=none and a reporting address first, fix any legitimate senders that fail SPF or DKIM alignment, then move to quarantine and finally reject.
Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners
security.txt published
3.3% 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
14% 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
Content Security Policy present
17% observed · all sites 32%
Start with Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only to see what would break, tighten the policy over a few weeks, then enforce it.
Guide: Payment Security and PCI DSS: What Website Owners Need to Know

Where Forums & Communities sites lead

Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less81% observedall sites 67%
robots.txt published90% observedall sites 76%

Stack mix

CDN and edge

Cloudflare40%
Amazon CloudFront4.5%
Google edge2.1%
Bunny CDN1.1%
Fastly1.1%
Azure Front Door/CDN<1%
Sucuri<1%
Vercel<1%

Platform or framework

WordPress9.8%
Next.js5%
Drupal2.1%
Nuxt1.9%
Blogger<1%
Shopify<1%
Sitecore<1%
Bitrix<1%

DNS operator

Cloudflare49%
Amazon Route 5310%
GoDaddy DNS1.3%
Google Cloud DNS1.1%
Network Solutions DNS1.1%
Xserver/Value-Domain DNS1.1%
Bunny DNS<1%
Linode/Akamai DNS<1%

Certificate authority

Let's Encrypt44%
Google Trust Services35%
Amazon6.6%
Sectigo4.5%
DigiCert3.4%
GoDaddy1.6%
GlobalSign1.1%
Actalis S.p.A.<1%

Readiness leaders

Forums & Communities 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 Forums & Communities

Check	Lane	Observed	All sites	Measured
HTTP requests move to HTTPS	Harden	90%	91%	355
HSTS kept for at least a year	Harden	28%	34%	369
TLS 1.3 negotiated	Harden	88%	91%	373
Certificate has more than 14 days left	Harden	99%	99%	373
Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less	Harden	81%	67%	373
CAA records limit who can issue certificates	Harden	14%	13%	376
DNSSEC signed	Harden	7.2%	8%	377
security.txt published	Harden	3.3%	7.1%	362
DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject	Harden	31%	39%	377
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff	Harden	47%	48%	369
Framing restricted	Harden	54%	51%	369
Content Security Policy present	Harden	17%	32%	369
Referrer-Policy set	Harden	25%	24%	369
HTTP/2 negotiated	Accelerate	87%	90%	373
HTTP/3 advertised	Accelerate	33%	37%	369
HTML compressed	Accelerate	96%	93%	369
Static files cached for 30 days or more	Accelerate	51%	51%	324
Modern image formats in use	Accelerate	30%	40%	294
Offscreen images lazy-loaded	Accelerate	51%	62%	265
No render-blocking scripts in <head>	Accelerate	41%	48%	369
robots.txt published	Enable	90%	76%	365
XML sitemap discoverable	Enable	61%	70%	366
Reachable over IPv6	Enable	47%	48%	377
Canonical URL declared	Enable	61%	68%	369
Meta description written	Enable	85%	84%	369
Mobile viewport configured	Enable	87%	94%	369
Structured data present	Enable	37%	51%	369
Social preview image set	Enable	55%	57%	369
Page language declared	Enable	88%	90%	369
At most one redirect to the homepage	Enable	98%	98%	370
Nameservers spread across providers	Recover	7%	10%	374

Forums & Communities profiles

Readiness index shown next to each site.

Forums & Communities: website readiness

Readiness by lane

Biggest gaps for Forums & Communities sites

HSTS kept for at least a year

Modern image formats in use

DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

security.txt published

CAA records limit who can issue certificates

Content Security Policy present