GoDaddy Website Builder: readiness playbook

Readiness by lane

The GoDaddy Website Builder playbook

Gaps ordered by impact, with the platform-specific step where one exists.

1. HSTS kept for at least a year

   14% observed · all sites 31%

   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.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

2. Modern image formats in use

   31% observed · all sites 40%

   Serve WebP or AVIF with a JPEG or PNG fallback, either through an image CDN or by generating both formats at build time.

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

3. DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

   33% observed · all sites 31%

   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.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

4. security.txt published

   0% observed · all sites 5.5%

   Publish /.well-known/security.txt with at least Contact and Expires fields, as RFC 9116 requires, and review it before it expires.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

5. CAA records limit who can issue certificates

   <1% observed · all sites 11%

   Publish CAA records naming every CA you actually use, including the CAs your CDN uses for managed certificates. Add an iodef contact if you want reports.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

6. Static files cached for 30 days or more

   45% observed · all sites 50%

   Give versioned (fingerprinted) CSS, JavaScript, fonts and images Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable, and change the file name whenever the content changes.

   Guide: Browser Caching Guide for Website Owners

7. Content Security Policy present

   21% observed · all sites 31%

   Start with Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only to see what would break, tighten the policy over a few weeks, then enforce it.

   Guide: Payment Security and PCI DSS: What Website Owners Need to Know

8. Framing restricted

   23% observed · all sites 49%

   Send Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' (or a list of trusted origins). X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN covers older browsers.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

Where GoDaddy Website Builder sites lead

• HTML compressed>99% observedall sites 93%
• Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less80% observedall sites 75%
• robots.txt published83% observedall sites 79%
• HTTP/3 advertised40% observedall sites 36%

A note on hosted platforms

On GoDaddy Website Builder, the platform controls much of the TLS, header and caching configuration. Owners mostly influence content-level checks such as images, structured data, social previews and the sitemap. Header-level gaps are worth raising with the platform.

All 31 checks on GoDaddy Website Builder

Related