thejournal.ie

Readiness by lane

Green: thejournal.ie. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for thejournal.ie

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

1. Priority 1 · Enable

   Mobile viewport configured

   Observed: The homepage had no viewport meta tag, so phones may render it zoomed out.

   Why it matters: Without it, phones render the page at desktop width and shrink it, which makes text tiny and hard to use.

   What to do: Add <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> and check the layout on small screens.

   98% of News & Media peers do this. Limit: Based on the homepage HTML delivered to an automated client; scripts that run later were not executed.

   Guide: Responsive Web Design Checklist for Real Devices

2. Priority 2 · Harden

   TLS 1.3 negotiated

   Observed: The TLS connection negotiated TLSv1.2.

   What to do: Enable TLS 1.3 on your CDN or server. Keep TLS 1.2 available for older clients unless you have checked your audience.

   On Cloudflare: Turn on TLS 1.3 under SSL/TLS > Edge Certificates.

   93% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: The homepage response did not include a Strict-Transport-Security header.

   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.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   Modern image formats in use

   Observed: The homepage had 73 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.

   On Cloudflare: Cloudflare Polish can convert images to WebP.

   44% of News & Media peers do this.

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

What thejournal.ie already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=quarantine.37% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.thejournal.ie/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.2, HTTP/2

Certificate

Amazon, 197-day validity, expiring 2026-12-26

DNS operators

Cloudflare

DMARC policy

p=quarantine

Homepage HTML

353 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

73 (jpg 24, svg 3, png 2, gif 2)

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

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• zdnet.co.kr47

News & Media readiness benchmark