hostelworld.com

Readiness by lane

Green: hostelworld.com. Thin bar: Hotels peer median.

Priority fixes for hostelworld.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 180 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.

   36% of Hotels 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 · Harden

   Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less

   Observed: The certificate from GlobalSign nv-sa had a 396-day validity period, longer than the 100-day maximum that applies from March 2027.

   What to do: Move to automated issuance and renewal now, while you still have time to test it.

   52% of Hotels peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   security.txt published

   Observed: No valid /.well-known/security.txt with a Contact field was returned.

   What to do: Publish /.well-known/security.txt with at least Contact and Expires fields, as RFC 9116 requires, and review it before it expires.

   9.9% of Hotels peers do this.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

4. Priority 4 · Harden

   DNSSEC signed

   Observed: No DS record was found for hostelworld.com at its parent zone, so its DNS answers are not DNSSEC-signed.

   What to do: Enable DNSSEC at your DNS provider, then add the DS record at your registrar. Plan provider moves carefully: a stale DS record can make the domain fail to resolve.

   8.5% of Hotels peers do this.

   Guide: Website Uptime Readiness: Prepare Before Traffic Arrives

What hostelworld.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of Hotels peers use.

• CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to amazon.com, certainly.com, digicert.com and others.15% of peers
• HTTP/3 advertisedHTTP/3 advertised.24% of peers
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.30% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.hostelworld.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

GlobalSign, 396-day validity, expiring 2026-12-19

CDN or edge

Google edge

Platform or framework

Nuxt

DNS operators

Google Cloud DNS

HSTS

max-age 180 days, includeSubDomains

DMARC policy

p=quarantine

Homepage HTML

316 KB, br

Images on homepage

82 (jpg 43, png 22, svg 18)

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 Hotels sites

• airbnb.cl91
• airbnb.it92
• barcelo.com80
• centerparcs.co.uk85
• clubmed.fr79

Hotels readiness benchmark