Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
scmp.com
scmp.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 79/100
- Ahead of
- 86%
- Practices observed
- 22/30
- Popularity band
- Top 50K
News & Media median 68
of measured News & Media sites
1 of 31 could not be measured
Chrome UX Report top-sites list
Readiness by lane
Green: scmp.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
100/100
Peers 89
Harden
66/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
82/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for scmp.com
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Harden
HSTS kept for at least a year
Observed: The homepage response did not include a Strict-Transport-Security header.
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 Cloudflare: Enable HSTS under SSL/TLS > Edge Certificates > HTTP Strict Transport Security and raise max-age gradually.
35% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Read from the homepage response only; other pages or regions may send different headers.
Priority 2 · Accelerate
Modern image formats in use
Observed: The homepage had 28 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.
On Cloudflare: Cloudflare Polish can convert images to WebP.
44% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format
Priority 3 · Harden
Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less
Observed: The certificate from Sectigo Limited had a 386-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.
Priority 4 · Harden
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Observed: The homepage response did not include X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff.
What to do: Send X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff on all responses and make sure each file is served with the correct Content-Type.
On Cloudflare: Add the header with a response header transform rule.
42% of News & Media peers do this.
What scmp.com already does well
Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.
- CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to sectigo.com, trust-provider.com, usertrust.com.13% of peers
- Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.29% of peers
- HTTP/3 advertisedHTTP/3 advertised.36% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://www.scmp.com/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- Sectigo, 386-day validity, expiring 2027-01-19
- CDN or edge
- Cloudflare
- Platform or framework
- Drupal, Next.js
- DNS operators
- Cloudflare
- DMARC policy
- p=quarantine
- Homepage HTML
- 2,091 KB, br
- Images on homepage
- 28 (jpg 91)
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 8
Observed 22
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- CAA records limit who can issue certificates
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- Framing restricted
- Content Security Policy present
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- HTTP/3 advertised
- HTML compressed
- 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
- Social preview image set
- Page language declared
- At most one redirect to the homepage
Not measured 1
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
Own scmp.com?
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Live status for this site: Status Is Down: scmp.com. This profile covers configuration only.