elsevier.com

Readiness by lane

Green: elsevier.com. Thin bar: Literary & Knowledge peer median.

Priority fixes for elsevier.com

Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.

1. Priority 1 · Harden

   TLS 1.3 negotiated

   Observed: The TLS connection negotiated TLSv1.2.

   Why it matters: TLS 1.3 removes legacy cipher suites and completes the handshake in fewer round trips, so it is both safer and faster for new connections.

   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.

   On Cloudflare: Turn on TLS 1.3 under SSL/TLS > Edge Certificates.

   88% of Literary & Knowledge peers do this. Limit: Certificate and protocol were observed from one vantage point; CDNs can present different certificates by region.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

2. Priority 2 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 37 days, below the one-year benchmark.

   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 Cloudflare: Enable HSTS under SSL/TLS > Edge Certificates > HTTP Strict Transport Security and raise max-age gradually.

   28% of Literary & Knowledge peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

3. 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.

   On Next.js: Use the next/script component with an appropriate loading strategy.

   48% of Literary & Knowledge peers do this.

   Guide: Control Third-Party Scripts Before They Control Your Page

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   HTTP/3 advertised

   Observed: The homepage did not advertise HTTP/3 through an Alt-Svc header.

   What to do: Turn on HTTP/3 at your CDN. Browsers fall back to HTTP/2 automatically, so the risk is low.

   On Cloudflare: Enable HTTP/3 (with QUIC) under Speed > Optimization > Protocol Optimization.

   47% of Literary & Knowledge peers do this.

   Guide: CDN Guide for Website Owners

What elsevier.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of Literary & Knowledge peers use.

• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.18% of peers
• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=reject.22% of peers
• Modern image formats in useWebP or AVIF images detected.31% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.elsevier.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.2, HTTP/2

Certificate

Google Trust Services, 30-day validity, expiring 2026-11-11

CDN or edge

Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront

Platform or framework

Next.js

DNS operators

1 self-run or other nameserver domain

HSTS

max-age 37 days

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

390 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

36 (jpg 92, svg 9, webp 2)

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 Literary & Knowledge sites

• chowhound.com71
• cocomic.co71
• deadlock.wiki71
• komikindo.ch71
• lectorxd.com71

Literary & Knowledge readiness benchmark