rfa.org

Readiness by lane

Green: rfa.org. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for rfa.org

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.

   35% of News & Media 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 · Enable

   Meta description written

   Observed: The homepage had no meta description.

   What to do: Write a short, specific description of the page for people, not a list of keywords.

   95% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: Meta Titles and Descriptions That Match Search Intent

3. Priority 3 · Accelerate

   Modern image formats in use

   Observed: The homepage had 27 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.

   44% of News & Media 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 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.

   42% of News & Media peers do this.

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

What rfa.org already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.29% of peers
• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=quarantine.37% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.rfa.org/

Homepage response

HTTP 200, after 1 redirect

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2027-01-07

CDN or edge

Akamai

DNS operators

Amazon Route 53

HSTS

max-age 1 days

DMARC policy

p=quarantine

Homepage HTML

178 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

27 (jpg 107, png 5)

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

• pravda.com.ua67
• punchng.com67
• purebreak.com67
• sanjevani.com67
• scinexx.de67

News & Media readiness benchmark