mlb.com

Readiness by lane

Green: mlb.com. Thin bar: Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peer median.

Priority fixes for mlb.com

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

1. Priority 1 · Enable

   XML sitemap discoverable

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

   Why it matters: A sitemap helps search engines find new and updated pages, especially on large or frequently updated sites.

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

   77% of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peers do this. Limit: Only the standard location was requested, once, at the time of the check.

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

2. Priority 2 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 7 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 Fastly: Add the header in VCL or a header rule as described in Fastly's HSTS guide.

   27% of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

3. Priority 3 · Accelerate

   Modern image formats in use

   Observed: The homepage had 105 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 Next.js: The next/image component serves optimized formats automatically.

   35% of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games 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 Next.js: Use the next/script component with an appropriate loading strategy.

   43% of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peers do this.

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

What mlb.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games peers use.

• security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.2.7% of peers
• CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to amazon.com, digicert.com, letsencrypt.org and others.7.7% of peers
• Nameservers spread across providersNameservers spread across Amazon Route 53 and Google Cloud DNS.16% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.mlb.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

DigiCert, 389-day validity, expiring 2027-02-02

CDN or edge

Fastly, Google edge

Platform or framework

Next.js

DNS operators

Amazon Route 53, Google Cloud DNS

HSTS

max-age 7 days

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

1,363 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

105 (svg 42, jpg 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

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Sports Broadcast & Fantasy Games readiness benchmark