Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 85/100
- Ahead of
- 97%
- Practices observed
- 25/31
- Popularity band
- Top 50K
News & Media median 68
of measured News & Media sites
0 of 31 could not be measured
Chrome UX Report top-sites list
Readiness by lane
Green: sciencealert.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
92/100
Peers 89
Harden
83/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
85/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for sciencealert.com
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Accelerate
Modern image formats in use
Observed: The homepage had 18 images and none used WebP or AVIF.
Why it matters: WebP and AVIF are typically much smaller than JPEG or PNG at similar quality, and images are often the heaviest part of a page.
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 Cloudflare: Cloudflare Polish can convert images to WebP.
44% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Based on the homepage HTML delivered to an automated client; scripts that run later were not executed.
Guide: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format
Priority 2 · 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.
71% of News & Media peers do this.
Priority 3 · Harden
Content Security Policy present
Observed: The homepage response did not include a Content-Security-Policy header.
What to do: Start with Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only to see what would break, tighten the policy over a few weeks, then enforce it.
29% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: Payment Security and PCI DSS: What Website Owners Need to Know
Priority 4 · Harden
security.txt published
Observed: No valid /.well-known/security.txt with a Contact field was returned.
What to do: Publish /.well-known/security.txt with at least Contact and Expires fields, as RFC 9116 requires, and review it before it expires.
On Cloudflare: Cloudflare Security Center can serve a security.txt file for the zone.
6.2% of News & Media peers do this.
What sciencealert.com already does well
Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.
- CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to comodoca.com, digicert.com, letsencrypt.org and others.13% of peers
- Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.22% of peers
- HSTS kept for at least a yearHSTS with a 365-day max-age.35% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://www.sciencealert.com/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- Google Trust Services, 90-day validity, expiring 2027-01-10
- CDN or edge
- Cloudflare, Kinsta
- Platform or framework
- WordPress
- DNS operators
- Cloudflare
- HSTS
- max-age 365 days
- DMARC policy
- p=reject
- Homepage HTML
- 193 KB, br
- Images on homepage
- 18 (jpg 70, png 49)
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
Not observed 6
Observed 25
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- HSTS kept for at least a year
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less
- CAA records limit who can issue certificates
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
- Framing restricted
- Referrer-Policy set
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- HTTP/3 advertised
- HTML compressed
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
- No render-blocking scripts in <head>
- robots.txt published
- XML sitemap discoverable
- Reachable over IPv6
- Canonical URL declared
- Meta description written
- Mobile viewport configured
- Structured data present
- Page language declared
- At most one redirect to the homepage
Own sciencealert.com?
Re-run the checks after a change, or verify the site in a free workspace to save reports with history, compare against similar sites and competitors, and track a private action plan. What owners get.
Live status for this site: Status Is Down: sciencealert.com. This profile covers configuration only.