sowetan.co.za

Readiness by lane

Green: sowetan.co.za. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for sowetan.co.za

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

1. 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.

   35% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Read from the homepage response only; other pages or regions may send different headers.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

2. Priority 2 · Accelerate

   Modern image formats in use

   Observed: The homepage had 43 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.

   44% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: AVIF, WebP, JPEG, and PNG: Choose the Right Image Format

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

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

   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.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

4. Priority 4 · 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.

   42% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

What sowetan.co.za 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
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.29% of peers
• No render-blocking scripts in <head>Head scripts load without blocking.42% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.sowetan.co.za/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2026-11-22

DNS operators

3 self-run or other nameserver domains

DMARC policy

p=none

Homepage HTML

290 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

43 (jpg 156, png 6)

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

• slashfilm.com71
• sol.no71
• sootoday.com71
• spletnik.ru71
• starhit.ru71

News & Media readiness benchmark