kotaku.com

Readiness by lane

Green: kotaku.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for kotaku.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.

   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. 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

   Meta description written

   Observed: The homepage had no meta description.

   What to do: Write a short, specific description of the page for people, not a list of keywords.

   95% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: Meta Titles and Descriptions That Match Search Intent

3. Priority 3 · Accelerate

   Modern image formats in use

   Observed: The homepage had 63 images and none used WebP or AVIF.

   What to do: Serve WebP or AVIF with a JPEG or PNG fallback, either through an image CDN or by generating both formats at build time.

   On Cloudflare: Cloudflare Polish can convert images to WebP.

   44% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   No render-blocking scripts in <head>

   Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 5 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.

   On WordPress: Since WordPress 6.3, scripts can be registered with a defer or async loading strategy.

   42% of News & Media peers do this.

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

What kotaku.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• DNSSEC signedDNSSEC delegation (DS record) present.6.1% of peers
• Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.22% of peers
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.29% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://kotaku.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Google Trust Services, 90-day validity, expiring 2026-12-01

CDN or edge

Cloudflare

Platform or framework

WordPress

DNS operators

Cloudflare

HSTS

max-age 180 days, includeSubDomains, preload

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

178 KB, br

Images on homepage

63 (jpg 344, png 12)

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

• is.fi76
• khaleejtimes.com76
• kooora.com76
• lalsace.fr76
• lanacion.com.ar76

News & Media readiness benchmark