Website readiness profile · Snapshot 23 October 2026
theguardian.com
theguardian.com's public homepage, certificate and DNS checked against 31 practices and compared with 3,856 News & Media sites.
- Readiness index
- 80/100
- Ahead of
- 90%
- Practices observed
- 22/29
- Popularity band
- Top 1K
News & Media median 68
of measured News & Media sites
2 of 31 could not be measured
Chrome UX Report top-sites list
Readiness by lane
Green: theguardian.com. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.
Enable
68/100
Peers 89
Harden
85/100
Peers 56
Accelerate
82/100
Peers 68
Recover
100/100
Peers 11
Priority fixes for theguardian.com
Ordered by impact and by how common each practice is among peers.
Priority 1 · Enable
XML sitemap discoverable
Observed: No sitemap was listed in robots.txt or found at /sitemap.xml.
Why it matters: A sitemap helps search engines find new and updated pages, especially on large or frequently updated sites.
What to do: Generate an XML sitemap of canonical URLs, reference it in robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console.
87% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Only the standard location was requested, once, at the time of the check.
Guide: XML Sitemap Guide: Include Only URLs You Stand Behind
Priority 2 · Accelerate
Modern image formats in use
Observed: The homepage had 125 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
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.
Priority 4 · Enable
Social preview image set
Observed: The homepage had no og:image, so shared links may show without a preview image.
What to do: Add Open Graph tags, including og:image with a 1200 x 630 image.
71% of News & Media peers do this.
What theguardian.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
- Nameservers spread across providersNameservers spread across more than one operator.11% of peers
- Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.22% of peers
What we saw
- Homepage checked
- https://www.theguardian.com/
- Homepage response
- HTTP 200, after 1 redirect
- TLS
- TLSv1.3, HTTP/2
- Certificate
- GlobalSign, 198-day validity, expiring 2027-03-05
- DNS operators
- NS1, plus 1 self-run or other nameserver domain
- HSTS
- max-age 730 days, includeSubDomains, preload
- DMARC policy
- p=reject
- Homepage HTML
- 1,371 KB, gzip
- Images on homepage
- 125 (jpg 806, png 54)
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 22
- HTTP requests move to HTTPS
- HSTS kept for at least a year
- TLS 1.3 negotiated
- 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
- HTTP/3 advertised
- HTML compressed
- Offscreen images lazy-loaded
- No render-blocking scripts in <head>
- Reachable over IPv6
- Canonical URL declared
- Meta description written
- Mobile viewport configured
- Page language declared
- At most one redirect to the homepage
- Nameservers spread across providers
Not measured 2
- Static files cached for 30 days or more
- robots.txt published
Own theguardian.com?
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: theguardian.com. This profile covers configuration only.