the-star.co.ke

Readiness by lane

Green: the-star.co.ke. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for the-star.co.ke

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.

   On Cloudflare: Enable HSTS under SSL/TLS > Edge Certificates > HTTP Strict Transport Security and raise max-age gradually.

   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

   No render-blocking scripts in <head>

   Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 1 external script 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.

   On Next.js: Use the next/script component with an appropriate loading strategy.

   42% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: Control Third-Party Scripts Before They Control Your Page

3. Priority 3 · Enable

   Structured data present

   Observed: The homepage had no JSON-LD structured data.

   What to do: Add JSON-LD for your organization and main content types, then test it with Google's Rich Results Test.

   76% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: Structured Data Basics for Website 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.

   On Cloudflare: Add the header with a response header transform rule.

   42% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

What the-star.co.ke already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to comodoca.com, digicert.com, letsencrypt.org and others.13% of peers
• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=reject.37% of peers
• Modern image formats in useWebP or AVIF images detected.44% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.the-star.co.ke/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Google Trust Services, 90-day validity, expiring 2027-01-06

CDN or edge

Cloudflare

Platform or framework

Next.js

DNS operators

Cloudflare

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

358 KB, br

Images on homepage

37 (webp 35, jpg 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

Compare with other News & Media sites

• stirileprotv.ro72
• suedkurier.de72
• tbsnews.net72
• wirtualnemedia.pl72
• zeelandnet.nl72

News & Media readiness benchmark