twistedsifter.com

Readiness by lane

Green: twistedsifter.com. Thin bar: Online Publishing peer median.

Priority fixes for twistedsifter.com

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

1. Priority 1 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 1 days, below the one-year benchmark.

   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.

   27% of Online Publishing 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

   Modern image formats in use

   Observed: The homepage had 42 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 WordPress: WordPress has supported WebP uploads since 5.8 and AVIF since 6.5; image plugins or the host can convert existing images.

   38% of Online Publishing peers do this.

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

3. Priority 3 · Accelerate

   No render-blocking scripts in <head>

   Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 2 external scripts 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 WordPress: Since WordPress 6.3, scripts can be registered with a defer or async loading strategy.

   45% of Online Publishing peers do this.

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

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   HTTP/3 advertised

   Observed: The homepage did not advertise HTTP/3 through an Alt-Svc header.

   What to do: Turn on HTTP/3 at your CDN. Browsers fall back to HTTP/2 automatically, so the risk is low.

   41% of Online Publishing peers do this.

   Guide: CDN Guide for Website Owners

What twistedsifter.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of Online Publishing peers use.

• DMARC policy enforces quarantine or rejectDMARC policy p=reject.20% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://twistedsifter.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2027-01-16

CDN or edge

WordPress VIP

Platform or framework

WordPress

DNS operators

1 self-run or other nameserver domain

HSTS

max-age 1 days

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

99 KB, br

Images on homepage

42 (jpg 79, png 34, gif 19)

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 Online Publishing sites

• cheezburger.com65
• mundoinspiradoz.com66
• novelarrow.com66
• pawmanga.onl65
• pressreader.com66

Online Publishing readiness benchmark