Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
metro.co.uk
metro.co.uk's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 71/100
- Ahead of
- 61%
- Practices observed
- 19/31
- Popularity band
- Top 10K
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: metro.co.uk. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
95/100
Peers 89
Harden
63/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
63/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for metro.co.uk
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Accelerate
Modern image formats in use
Observed: The homepage had 141 images and none used WebP or AVIF.
Why it matters: WebP and AVIF are typically much smaller than JPEG or PNG at similar quality, and images are often the heaviest part of a page.
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 WordPress: WordPress has supported WebP uploads since 5.8 and AVIF since 6.5; image plugins or the host can convert existing images.
44% 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: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format
Priority 2 · Accelerate
No render-blocking scripts in <head>
Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 6 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
Priority 3 · Harden
Framing restricted
Observed: The homepage did not send frame-ancestors or X-Frame-Options, so other sites may frame it.
What to do: Send Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' (or a list of trusted origins). X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN covers older browsers.
42% of News & Media peers do this.
Priority 4 · Accelerate
HTTP/3 advertised
Observed: The homepage did not advertise HTTP/3 through an Alt-Svc header.
What to do: Turn on HTTP/3 at your CDN. Browsers fall back to HTTP/2 automatically, so the risk is low.
36% of News & Media peers do this.
What metro.co.uk already does well
Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.
- HSTS kept for at least a yearHSTS with a 365-day max-age.35% of peers
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=reject.37% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://metro.co.uk/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2026-11-30
- CDN or edge
- WordPress VIP
- Platform or framework
- WordPress
- DNS operators
- Akamai Edge DNS
- HSTS
- max-age 365 days
- DMARC policy
- p=reject
- Homepage HTML
- 586 KB, br
- Images on homepage
- 141 (jpg 114, png 27)
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 12
- CAA records limit who can issue certificates
- DNSSEC signed
- security.txt published
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
- Framing restricted
- Content Security Policy present
- Referrer-Policy set
- HTTP/3 advertised
- Modern image formats in use
- No render-blocking scripts in <head>
- Reachable over IPv6
- Nameservers spread across providers
Observed 19
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- HSTS kept for at least a year
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- HTML compressed
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
- 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
Own metro.co.uk?
Re-run the checks after a change, keep a private action plan in a free workspace, or report a mistake.
Live status for this site: Status Is Down: metro.co.uk. This profile covers configuration only.