realclearpolitics.com

Readiness by lane

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

Priority fixes for realclearpolitics.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.

   87% of News & Media 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 · Accelerate

   Static files cached for 30 days or more

   Observed: A same-site stylesheet or script was cacheable for no max-age, 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.

   60% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: Browser Caching Guide for Website Owners

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: The homepage response did not include a Strict-Transport-Security header.

   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 Amazon CloudFront: Attach a response headers policy with Strict-Transport-Security to each distribution.

   35% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · 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.

   On Amazon CloudFront: Set frame options in a response headers policy.

   42% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

What realclearpolitics.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=quarantine.37% of peers
• No render-blocking scripts in <head>Head scripts load without blocking.42% of peers
• Modern image formats in useWebP or AVIF images detected.44% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Amazon, 197-day validity, expiring 2027-04-13

CDN or edge

Amazon CloudFront

DNS operators

DNS Made Easy

DMARC policy

p=quarantine

Homepage HTML

96 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

23 (jpg 18, png 11, webp 10, gif 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 News & Media sites

• pannchoa.com65
• pinzuba.news65
• pudelek.pl65
• rollingstone.de65
• sciencepost.fr65

News & Media readiness benchmark