heise.de

Readiness by lane

Green: heise.de. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for heise.de

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

1. Priority 1 · Accelerate

   Static files cached for 30 days or more

   Observed: A same-site stylesheet or script was cacheable for 120 seconds, short of the 30-day benchmark.

   Why it matters: Returning visitors and later page views reuse cached files instead of downloading them again.

   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.

   60% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Read from the homepage response only; other pages or regions may send different headers.

   Guide: Browser Caching 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 183 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.

   35% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

   Observed: The DMARC policy for heise.de was p=none, which asks receivers to take no action on failing mail.

   What to do: 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.

   37% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

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.

   36% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: CDN Guide for Website Owners

What heise.de already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.6.2% of peers
• Nameservers spread across providersNameservers spread across more than one operator.11% of peers
• CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to amazon.com, digicert.com, letsencrypt.org and others.13% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.heise.de/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2026-12-15

DNS operators

4 self-run or other nameserver domains

HSTS

max-age 183 days

DMARC policy

p=none

Homepage HTML

926 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

548 (svg 402, webp 6, jpg 1, png 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 News & Media sites

• express.de78
• fanatik.ro78
• forbes.com78
• hindutamil.in78
• hromadske.ua78

News & Media readiness benchmark