halfords.com

Readiness by lane

Green: halfords.com. Thin bar: Cars & Automotive peer median.

Priority fixes for halfords.com

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

1. Priority 1 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 183 days, below the one-year benchmark.

   Why it matters: HSTS tells browsers to use HTTPS for your host on every later visit, which removes the window where a first HTTP request can be intercepted.

   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.

   41% of Cars & Automotive peers do this. Limit: Read from the homepage response only; other pages or regions may send different headers.

   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 600 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 Cars & Automotive peers do this.

   Guide: Browser Caching 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.

   45% of Cars & Automotive peers do this.

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

4. Priority 4 · Enable

   Social preview image set

   Observed: The homepage had no og:image, so shared links may show without a preview image.

   What to do: Add Open Graph tags, including og:image with a 1200 x 630 image.

   62% of Cars & Automotive peers do this.

   Guide: SEO Checklist for a New Website

What halfords.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of Cars & Automotive peers use.

• Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.26% of peers
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.31% of peers
• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=quarantine.41% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.halfords.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

DigiCert, 198-day validity, expiring 2026-12-29

CDN or edge

Amazon CloudFront

DNS operators

Akamai Edge DNS

HSTS

max-age 183 days

DMARC policy

p=quarantine

Homepage HTML

1,245 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

16 (png 4, svg 1)

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 Cars & Automotive sites

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Cars & Automotive readiness benchmark