Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
cnn.com
cnn.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 72/100
- Ahead of
- 66%
- Practices observed
- 18/27
- Popularity band
- Top 1K
News & Media median 68
of measured News & Media sites
4 of 31 could not be measured
Chrome UX Report top-sites list
Readiness by lane
Green: cnn.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
85/100
Peers 89
Harden
65/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
79/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for cnn.com
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Enable
XML sitemap discoverable
Observed: No sitemap was listed in robots.txt or found at /sitemap.xml.
Why it matters: A sitemap helps search engines find new and updated pages, especially on large or frequently updated sites.
What to do: Generate an XML sitemap of canonical URLs, reference it in robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console.
87% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Only the standard location was requested, once, at the time of the check.
Guide: XML Sitemap Guide: Include Only URLs You Stand Behind
Priority 2 · 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.
On Fastly: Add the header in VCL or a header rule as described in Fastly's HSTS guide.
35% of News & Media peers do this.
Priority 3 · Accelerate
No render-blocking scripts in <head>
Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 1 external script without async or defer.
What to do: Add defer to scripts that need the DOM, async to independent ones such as analytics, or move them to the end of the body.
42% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: Control Third-Party Scripts Before They Control Your Page
Priority 4 · Harden
Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less
Observed: The certificate from GlobalSign nv-sa had a 198-day validity period, longer than the 100-day maximum that applies from March 2027.
What to do: Move to automated issuance and renewal now, while you still have time to test it.
66% of News & Media peers do this.
What cnn.com already does well
Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.
- Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.29% of peers
- HTTP/3 advertisedHTTP/3 advertised.36% of peers
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=reject.37% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://www.cnn.com/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- GlobalSign, 198-day validity, expiring 2027-03-21
- CDN or edge
- Fastly
- DNS operators
- Amazon Route 53
- DMARC policy
- p=reject
- Homepage HTML
- 6,739 KB, br
- Images on homepage
- 0
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
Not observed 9
Observed 18
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
- Framing restricted
- Content Security Policy present
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- HTTP/3 advertised
- HTML compressed
- Reachable over IPv6
- Canonical URL declared
- Meta description written
- Mobile viewport configured
- Structured data present
- Social preview image set
- Page language declared
- At most one redirect to the homepage
Not measured 4
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
- Modern image formats in use
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
- robots.txt published
Own cnn.com?
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Live status for this site: Status Is Down: cnn.com. This profile covers configuration only.