incometax.gov.in

Readiness by lane

Green: incometax.gov.in. Thin bar: Government Services peer median.

Priority fixes for incometax.gov.in

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.

   51% of Government Services 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 · Enable

   robots.txt published

   Observed: No robots.txt file was returned at the site root.

   What to do: Publish /robots.txt with any crawl rules you need and a Sitemap: line pointing to your XML sitemap.

   61% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: Robots.txt Guide: Control Crawling Without Hiding Mistakes

3. Priority 3 · Enable

   XML sitemap discoverable

   Observed: No sitemap was listed in robots.txt or found at /sitemap.xml.

   What to do: Generate an XML sitemap of canonical URLs, reference it in robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console.

   42% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: XML Sitemap Guide: Include Only URLs You Stand Behind

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   No render-blocking scripts in <head>

   Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 7 external scripts 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.

   39% of Government Services peers do this.

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

What incometax.gov.in already does well

Practices fewer than half of Government Services peers use.

• Modern image formats in useWebP or AVIF images detected.15% of peers
• Reachable over IPv6IPv6 address published.27% of peers
• Static files cached for 30 days or moreLong-lived caching on static files.30% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.incometax.gov.in/

Homepage response

HTTP 200, after 1 redirect

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

DigiCert, 198-day validity, expiring 2026-12-31

CDN or edge

Akamai

Platform or framework

Drupal

DNS operators

1 self-run or other nameserver domain

HSTS

max-age 183 days, includeSubDomains

DMARC policy

p=quarantine

Homepage HTML

243 KB, br

Images on homepage

83 (svg 71, webp 7, png 4, jpg 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 Government Services sites

• estelamonline.net60
• govtschemes.in60
• inagov.go.id60
• kemenag.go.id60
• lmra.gov.bh60

Government Services readiness benchmark