Category benchmark · Snapshot 23 October 2026

Online Publishing: website readiness

31 configuration checks across 306 Online Publishing sites from the SID website catalog, with 177 individual profiles for sites in the Chrome UX Report top 50K.

Sites measured: 306
Median readiness index: 64/100
Profiles: 177
Weakest lane: Recover

Readiness by lane

Enable

84/100

All sites 77

Harden

51/100

All sites 56

Accelerate

65/100

All sites 64

Recover

5/100

All sites 10

Biggest gaps for Online Publishing sites

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

HSTS kept for at least a year
27% 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
DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
20% 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
1.3% 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
Modern image formats in use
38% 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
CAA records limit who can issue certificates
12% 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
18% 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 Online Publishing sites lead

robots.txt published91% observedall sites 76%
Structured data present64% observedall sites 51%
Canonical URL declared80% observedall sites 68%
Meta description written94% observedall sites 84%

Stack mix

CDN and edge

Platform or framework

WordPress43%
Next.js10%
Blogger2.6%
Shopify2.3%
Nuxt2%
Drupal1.3%
Astro<1%
Tilda<1%

DNS operator

Certificate authority

Readiness leaders

Online Publishing 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 Online Publishing

Check	Lane	Observed	All sites	Measured
HTTP requests move to HTTPS	Harden	93%	91%	293
HSTS kept for at least a year	Harden	27%	34%	303
TLS 1.3 negotiated	Harden	89%	91%	305
Certificate has more than 14 days left	Harden	98%	99%	305
Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less	Harden	71%	67%	305
CAA records limit who can issue certificates	Harden	12%	13%	306
DNSSEC signed	Harden	4.2%	8%	306
security.txt published	Harden	1.3%	7.1%	302
DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject	Harden	20%	39%	306
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff	Harden	43%	48%	303
Framing restricted	Harden	37%	51%	303
Content Security Policy present	Harden	18%	32%	303
Referrer-Policy set	Harden	20%	24%	303
HTTP/2 negotiated	Accelerate	92%	90%	305
HTTP/3 advertised	Accelerate	41%	37%	303
HTML compressed	Accelerate	94%	93%	302
Static files cached for 30 days or more	Accelerate	57%	51%	263
Modern image formats in use	Accelerate	38%	40%	282
Offscreen images lazy-loaded	Accelerate	58%	62%	272
No render-blocking scripts in <head>	Accelerate	45%	48%	303
robots.txt published	Enable	91%	76%	299
XML sitemap discoverable	Enable	79%	70%	304
Reachable over IPv6	Enable	48%	48%	306
Canonical URL declared	Enable	80%	68%	303
Meta description written	Enable	94%	84%	303
Mobile viewport configured	Enable	96%	94%	303
Structured data present	Enable	64%	51%	303
Social preview image set	Enable	67%	57%	303
Page language declared	Enable	92%	90%	303
At most one redirect to the homepage	Enable	97%	98%	304
Nameservers spread across providers	Recover	4.6%	10%	305

Online Publishing profiles

Readiness index shown next to each site.

Online Publishing: website readiness

Readiness by lane

Biggest gaps for Online Publishing sites

HSTS kept for at least a year

DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

security.txt published

Modern image formats in use

CAA records limit who can issue certificates

Content Security Policy present