Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
sfgate.com
sfgate.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 49/100
- Ahead of
- 4.5%
- Practices observed
- 11/29
- Popularity band
- Top 50K
News & Media median 68
of measured News & Media sites
2 of 31 could not be measured
Chrome UX Report top-sites list
Readiness by lane
Green: sfgate.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
59/100
Peers 89
Harden
48/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
40/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for sfgate.com
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Accelerate
HTML compressed
Observed: The homepage HTML (3 KB) was delivered without gzip, Brotli or zstd compression.
Why it matters: Compression usually shrinks HTML several times over, so the first bytes of the page arrive sooner on slow connections.
What to do: Enable Brotli or gzip for text responses (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, SVG) at the CDN or origin.
On Fastly: Enable compression for text content types.
97% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Read from the homepage response only; other pages or regions may send different headers.
Guide: How to Set a Website Performance Budget That Teams Can Keep
Priority 2 · Accelerate
Static files cached for 30 days or more
Observed: A same-site stylesheet or script was cacheable for 1 days, 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.
Priority 3 · Harden
HSTS kept for at least a year
Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 0 days, below the one-year benchmark.
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 Fastly: Add the header in VCL or a header rule as described in Fastly's HSTS guide.
35% of News & Media peers do this.
Priority 4 · 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
What sfgate.com already does well
Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=reject.37% of peers
- No render-blocking scripts in <head>Head scripts load without blocking.42% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://www.sfgate.com/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- GlobalSign, 198-day validity, expiring 2027-03-10
- CDN or edge
- Fastly
- DNS operators
- 1 self-run or other nameserver domain
- HSTS
- max-age 0 days
- DMARC policy
- p=reject
- Homepage HTML
- 3 KB, uncompressed
- Images on homepage
- 1 (svg 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
Not observed 18
- HSTS kept for at least a year
- Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less
- CAA records limit who can issue certificates
- DNSSEC signed
- security.txt published
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
- Framing restricted
- Content Security Policy present
- Referrer-Policy set
- HTTP/3 advertised
- HTML compressed
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
- Reachable over IPv6
- Canonical URL declared
- Meta description written
- Structured data present
- Social preview image set
- Nameservers spread across providers
Observed 11
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- No render-blocking scripts in <head>
- robots.txt published
- XML sitemap discoverable
- Mobile viewport configured
- Page language declared
- At most one redirect to the homepage
Not measured 2
- Modern image formats in use
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
Own sfgate.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: sfgate.com. This profile covers configuration only.