Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
the-independent.com
the-independent.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 92/100
- Ahead of
- >99%
- Practices observed
- 27/31
- Popularity band
- Top 50K
News & Media median 68
of measured News & Media sites
0 of 31 could not be measured
Chrome UX Report top-sites list
Readiness by lane
Green: the-independent.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
95/100
Peers 89
Harden
89/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
100/100
Peers 68
Recover
0/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for the-independent.com
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Harden
CAA records limit who can issue certificates
Observed: No CAA record was found for the-independent.com, so any public certificate authority may issue for it.
Why it matters: CAA records tell certificate authorities which of them may issue certificates for your domain, which narrows the chance of a mistaken or fraudulent certificate.
What to do: 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.
On Cloudflare: Cloudflare documents which CAs its managed certificates need; include them in your CAA records.
13% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Read from public DNS at the time of the check; records may have changed since.
Priority 2 · Enable
Reachable over IPv6
Observed: No IPv6 (AAAA) address was published for www.the-independent.com.
What to do: Enable IPv6 at your CDN or host and publish the AAAA record it provides.
On Cloudflare: Cloudflare offers IPv6 compatibility for proxied hostnames; check the setting in Network.
51% of News & Media peers do this.
Priority 3 · Harden
DNSSEC signed
Observed: No DS record was found for the-independent.com at its parent zone, so its DNS answers are not DNSSEC-signed.
What to do: Enable DNSSEC at your DNS provider, then add the DS record at your registrar. Plan provider moves carefully: a stale DS record can make the domain fail to resolve.
On Cloudflare: Enable DNSSEC in DNS > Settings and add the DS record at the registrar.
6.1% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: Website Uptime Readiness: Prepare Before Traffic Arrives
Priority 4 · Recover
Nameservers spread across providers
Observed: All nameservers for the-independent.com belong to Cloudflare.
What to do: Treat this as an advanced step. Add a secondary DNS provider through zone transfers or a multi-provider setup, then test changes carefully, since both providers must stay in sync.
On Cloudflare: Cloudflare supports zone transfers for primary or secondary DNS setups on eligible plans.
11% of News & Media peers do this.
Guide: Website Uptime Readiness: Prepare Before Traffic Arrives
What the-independent.com 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.the-independent.com/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2026-12-01
- CDN or edge
- Fastly
- DNS operators
- Cloudflare
- HSTS
- max-age 730 days, preload
- DMARC policy
- p=quarantine
- Homepage HTML
- 316 KB, br
- Images on homepage
- 80 (jpg 141, png 52, avif 3, webp 3)
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 4
Observed 27
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- HSTS kept for at least a year
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- Certificate has more than 14 days left
- Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less
- 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
- HTTP/3 advertised
- HTML compressed
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
- Modern image formats in use
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
- No render-blocking scripts in <head>
- robots.txt published
- XML sitemap discoverable
- 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
Own the-independent.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: the-independent.com. This profile covers configuration only.