ubuntu.com

Readiness by lane

Green: ubuntu.com. Thin bar: Programming & Software peer median.

Priority fixes for ubuntu.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 182 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.

   40% of Programming & Software 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 · Harden

   DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

   Observed: The DMARC policy for ubuntu.com was p=none, which asks receivers to take no action on failing mail.

   What to do: Publish DMARC with p=none and a reporting address first, fix any legitimate senders that fail SPF or DKIM alignment, then move to quarantine and finally reject.

   45% of Programming & Software peers do this.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

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.

   51% of Programming & Software 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.

   40% of Programming & Software peers do this.

   Guide: CDN Guide for Website Owners

What ubuntu.com already does well

Practices fewer than half of Programming & Software peers use.

• CAA records limit who can issue certificatesCAA limits issuance to digicert.com, letsencrypt.org.23% of peers
• Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.24% of peers
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.32% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://ubuntu.com/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2026-12-15

DNS operators

1 self-run or other nameserver domain

HSTS

max-age 182 days

DMARC policy

p=none

Homepage HTML

184 KB, br

Images on homepage

45 (png 86, jpg 51, svg 7)

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 Programming & Software sites

• apponic.com79
• huggingface.co78
• infineon.com80
• mediawiki.org79
• vanced.to79

Programming & Software readiness benchmark