espn.com

Readiness by lane

Green: espn.com. Thin bar: Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peer median.

Priority fixes for espn.com

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

1. Priority 1 · Harden

   Certificate has more than 14 days left

   Observed: The certificate from Sectigo Limited was due to expire on 2026-11-05 (13 days after the check).

   Why it matters: An expired certificate makes browsers show a full-page warning. Renewing well ahead of expiry leaves time to fix a failed renewal.

   What to do: Automate renewal with ACME (for example Let's Encrypt or your CDN's managed certificates) and add a renewal review to your release calendar so any certificate inside 21 days of expiry gets attention.

   99% of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games 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 · Accelerate

   Static files cached for 30 days or more

   Observed: A same-site stylesheet or script was cacheable for 300 seconds, short of the 30-day benchmark.

   What to do: Give versioned (fingerprinted) CSS, JavaScript, fonts and images Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable, and change the file name whenever the content changes.

   55% of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peers do this.

   Guide: Browser Caching Guide for Website Owners

3. Priority 3 · 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 Amazon CloudFront: Attach a response headers policy with Strict-Transport-Security to each distribution.

   27% of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   Modern image formats in use

   Observed: The homepage had 104 images and none used WebP or AVIF.

   What to do: Serve WebP or AVIF with a JPEG or PNG fallback, either through an image CDN or by generating both formats at build time.

   35% of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peers do this.

   Guide: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format

What espn.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peers use.

• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.18% of peers
• Framing restrictedFraming controls present.34% of peers
• Reachable over IPv6IPv6 address published.43% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.espn.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Sectigo, 198-day validity, expiring 2026-11-05

CDN or edge

Amazon CloudFront

DNS operators

Amazon Route 53

DMARC policy

p=none

Homepage HTML

300 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

104 (jpg 27, png 14)

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 Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games sites

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• livescore.red53
• tenisportal.cz53

Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games readiness benchmark