rtl.de

Readiness by lane

Green: rtl.de. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for rtl.de

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

1. Priority 1 · Harden

   DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

   Observed: The DMARC policy for rtl.de was p=none, which asks receivers to take no action on failing mail.

   Why it matters: An enforcing DMARC policy helps receiving mail systems reject email that falsely claims to come from your domain, a common route for phishing your customers.

   What to do: Publish DMARC with p=none and a reporting address first, fix any legitimate senders that fail SPF or DKIM alignment, then move to quarantine and finally reject.

   37% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Read from public DNS at the time of the check; records may have changed since.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for 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.

   42% of News & Media peers do this.

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

3. 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.

   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

4. Priority 4 · Harden

   Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less

   Observed: The certificate from Amazon had a 394-day validity period, longer than the 100-day maximum that applies from March 2027.

   What to do: Move to automated issuance and renewal now, while you still have time to test it.

   66% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

What rtl.de already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• Nameservers spread across providersNameservers spread across more than one operator.11% of peers
• Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.22% of peers
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.29% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.rtl.de/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Amazon, 394-day validity, expiring 2027-01-26

CDN or edge

Amazon CloudFront

Platform or framework

Next.js

DNS operators

4 self-run or other nameserver domains

HSTS

max-age 730 days, includeSubDomains, preload

DMARC policy

p=none

Homepage HTML

2,930 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

184 (webp 1797, jpg 3)

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

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• republicain-lorrain.fr76
• revistabula.com76
• ruhrnachrichten.de76
• saostar.vn76

News & Media readiness benchmark