Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 90/100
- Ahead of
- >99%
- Practices observed
- 26/31
- Popularity band
- Top 5K
News & Media median 68
of measured News & Media sites
0 of 31 could not be measured
Chrome UX Report top-sites list
Readiness by lane
Green: independent.co.uk. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
95/100
Peers 89
Harden
91/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
88/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for independent.co.uk
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Accelerate
No render-blocking scripts in <head>
Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 1 external script without async or defer.
Why it matters: A plain <script src> in the head stops the browser from showing anything until that file has downloaded and run.
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.
42% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Based on the homepage HTML delivered to an automated client; scripts that run later were not executed.
Guide: Control Third-Party Scripts Before They Control Your Page
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.
66% of News & Media peers do this.
Priority 3 · Enable
Reachable over IPv6
Observed: No IPv6 (AAAA) address was published for www.independent.co.uk.
What to do: Enable IPv6 at your CDN or host and publish the AAAA record it provides.
On Cloudflare: Cloudflare offers IPv6 compatibility for proxied hostnames; check the setting in Network.
51% of News & Media peers do this.
Priority 4 · Harden
DNSSEC signed
Observed: No DS record was found for independent.co.uk 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.
On Cloudflare: Enable DNSSEC in DNS > Settings and add the DS record at the registrar.
6.1% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: Website Uptime Readiness: Prepare Before Traffic Arrives
What independent.co.uk already does well
Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.
- security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.6.2% of peers
- CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to comodoca.com, digicert.com, globalsign.com and others.13% of peers
- Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.22% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://www.independent.co.uk/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- GlobalSign, 396-day validity, expiring 2027-03-22
- CDN or edge
- Fastly
- DNS operators
- Cloudflare
- HSTS
- max-age 730 days, preload
- DMARC policy
- p=quarantine
- Homepage HTML
- 333 KB, br
- Images on homepage
- 88 (jpg 129, png 76, webp 6)
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
Not observed 5
Observed 26
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- HSTS kept for at least a year
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- CAA records limit who can issue certificates
- security.txt published
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
- Framing restricted
- Content Security Policy present
- Referrer-Policy set
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- HTTP/3 advertised
- HTML compressed
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
- Modern image formats in use
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
- robots.txt published
- XML sitemap discoverable
- Canonical URL declared
- Meta description written
- Mobile viewport configured
- Structured data present
- Social preview image set
- Page language declared
- At most one redirect to the homepage
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Live status for this site: Status Is Down: independent.co.uk. This profile covers configuration only.