heute.at

Readiness by lane

Green: heute.at. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for heute.at

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

1. 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

2. Priority 2 · Accelerate

   Static files cached for 30 days or more

   Observed: A same-site stylesheet or script was cacheable for 1 days, 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.

   On Cloudflare: Use Cache Rules to set edge and browser TTLs for static file paths.

   60% of News & Media 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 Cloudflare: Enable HSTS under SSL/TLS > Edge Certificates > HTTP Strict Transport Security and raise max-age gradually.

   35% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   Offscreen images lazy-loaded

   Observed: The homepage had 436 images and none used loading="lazy".

   What to do: Add loading="lazy" to images below the fold. Do not lazy-load the main hero image, because that delays the largest visible element.

   72% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: Lazy Loading Without Broken Pages

What heute.at already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.6.2% of peers
• HTTP/3 advertisedHTTP/3 advertised.36% of peers
• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=quarantine.37% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.heute.at/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2027-01-19

CDN or edge

Cloudflare

DNS operators

Cloudflare

DMARC policy

p=quarantine

Homepage HTML

671 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

436 (jpg 218, png 160, svg 139, avif 2, gif 1, webp 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

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• hlavnespravy.sk63
• hovege.hu63

News & Media readiness benchmark