loc.gov

Readiness by lane

Green: loc.gov. Thin bar: Literary & Knowledge peer median.

Priority fixes for loc.gov

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

1. Priority 1 · Accelerate

   HTML compressed

   Observed: The homepage HTML (75 KB) was delivered without gzip, Brotli or zstd compression.

   Why it matters: Compression usually shrinks HTML several times over, so the first bytes of the page arrive sooner on slow connections.

   What to do: Enable Brotli or gzip for text responses (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, SVG) at the CDN or origin.

   On Cloudflare: Cloudflare compresses eligible responses; check compression rules if HTML arrives uncompressed.

   94% of Literary & Knowledge peers do this. Limit: Read from the homepage response only; other pages or regions may send different headers.

   Guide: How to Set a Website Performance Budget That Teams Can Keep

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.

   49% of Literary & Knowledge peers do this.

   Guide: Browser Caching Guide for Website Owners

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 0 days, below the one-year benchmark.

   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.

   28% of Literary & Knowledge peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   No render-blocking scripts in <head>

   Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 2 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.

   48% of Literary & Knowledge peers do this.

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

What loc.gov already does well

Practices fewer than half of Literary & Knowledge peers use.

• security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.5% of peers
• DNSSEC signedDNSSEC delegation (DS record) present.5.7% of peers
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.18% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.loc.gov/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Google Trust Services, 90-day validity, expiring 2027-01-08

CDN or edge

Cloudflare

Platform or framework

Shopify

DNS operators

Cloudflare

HSTS

max-age 0 days, preload

DMARC policy

p=none

Homepage HTML

75 KB, uncompressed

Images on homepage

60 (jpg 49, svg 11)

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

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Literary & Knowledge readiness benchmark