vatican.va

Readiness by lane

Green: vatican.va. Thin bar: Government Services peer median.

Priority fixes for vatican.va

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.

   92% of Government Services 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

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: Strict-Transport-Security was sent with a max-age of 183 days, below the one-year benchmark.

   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 Azure Front Door/CDN: Add a response header action in a Front Door rule set.

   51% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

   Observed: The DMARC policy for vatican.va 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.

   52% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   Static files cached for 30 days or more

   Observed: A same-site stylesheet or script was cacheable for 7 days, short of the 30-day benchmark.

   What to do: Give versioned (fingerprinted) CSS, JavaScript, fonts and images Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable, and change the file name whenever the content changes.

   30% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: Browser Caching Guide for Website Owners

What vatican.va already does well

Practices fewer than half of Government Services peers use.

• Nameservers spread across providersNameservers spread across more than one operator.25% of peers
• Reachable over IPv6IPv6 address published.27% of peers
• Canonical URL declaredCanonical link present.41% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.vatican.va/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

DigiCert, 181-day validity, expiring 2027-03-27

CDN or edge

Azure Front Door/CDN

DNS operators

2 self-run or other nameserver domains

HSTS

max-age 183 days, includeSubDomains, preload

DMARC policy

p=none

Homepage HTML

4 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

0

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 Government Services sites

• dmsu.gov.ua45
• fbr.gov.pk45
• njportal.com46
• ossc.gov.in46
• scholarships.gov.in46

Government Services readiness benchmark