Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
smh.com.au
smh.com.au's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 81/100
- Ahead of
- 92%
- Practices observed
- 23/30
- Popularity band
- Top 10K
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: smh.com.au. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
100/100
Peers 89
Harden
75/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
74/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for smh.com.au
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Harden
TLS 1.3 negotiated
Observed: The TLS connection negotiated TLSv1.2.
Why it matters: TLS 1.3 removes legacy cipher suites and completes the handshake in fewer round trips, so it is both safer and faster for new connections.
What to do: Enable TLS 1.3 on your CDN or server. Keep TLS 1.2 available for older clients unless you have checked your audience.
93% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Certificate and protocol were observed from one vantage point; CDNs can present different certificates by region.
Priority 2 · Accelerate
No render-blocking scripts in <head>
Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 2 external scripts 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
Priority 3 · Harden
Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less
Observed: The certificate from Sectigo Limited had a 198-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 · Accelerate
HTTP/3 advertised
Observed: The homepage did not advertise HTTP/3 through an Alt-Svc header.
What to do: Turn on HTTP/3 at your CDN. Browsers fall back to HTTP/2 automatically, so the risk is low.
36% of News & Media peers do this.
What smh.com.au already does well
Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.
- security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.6.2% 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.smh.com.au/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.2, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- Sectigo, 198-day validity, expiring 2027-04-08
- CDN or edge
- Fastly
- DNS operators
- Amazon Route 53
- HSTS
- max-age 365 days
- DMARC policy
- p=reject
- Homepage HTML
- 1,210 KB, gzip
- Images on homepage
- 95 (jpg 12)
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 7
Observed 23
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- HSTS kept for at least a year
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- security.txt published
- DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject
- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
- Framing restricted
- Content Security Policy present
- Referrer-Policy set
- HTTP/2 negotiated
- HTML compressed
- Modern image formats in use
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
- 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 smh.com.au?
Re-run the checks after a change, keep a private action plan in a free workspace, or report a mistake.
Live status for this site: Status Is Down: smh.com.au. This profile covers configuration only.