petsmart.com

Readiness by lane

Green: petsmart.com. Thin bar: Pet Services peer median.

Priority fixes for petsmart.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 1 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 Vercel: Declare the header in the headers section of vercel.json.

   30% of Pet Services 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 · Accelerate

   No render-blocking scripts in <head>

   Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 1 external script 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.

   31% of Pet Services peers do this.

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

3. Priority 3 · 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.

   49% of Pet Services peers do this.

   Guide: CDN Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · Enable

   Social preview image set

   Observed: The homepage had no og:image, so shared links may show without a preview image.

   What to do: Add Open Graph tags, including og:image with a 1200 x 630 image.

   67% of Pet Services peers do this.

   Guide: SEO Checklist for a New Website

What petsmart.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of Pet Services peers use.

• security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.13% of peers
• CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to digicert.com, globalsign.com, letsencrypt.org and others.19% of peers
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.30% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.petsmart.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2026-12-16

CDN or edge

Akamai, Vercel

Platform or framework

Next.js

DNS operators

Vercara UltraDNS

HSTS

max-age 1 days, includeSubDomains

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

829 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

74 (png 1)

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 Pet Services sites

• amomeupet.org75
• pets4homes.co.uk88
• petsmart.ca76
• supertails.com76
• timetopet.com82

Pet Services readiness benchmark