weather.gov

Readiness by lane

Green: weather.gov. Thin bar: Weather Forecast peer median.

Priority fixes for weather.gov

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.

   91% of Weather Forecast 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 · Enable

   robots.txt published

   Observed: No robots.txt file was returned at the site root.

   What to do: Publish /robots.txt with any crawl rules you need and a Sitemap: line pointing to your XML sitemap.

   90% of Weather Forecast peers do this.

   Guide: Robots.txt Guide: Control Crawling Without Hiding Mistakes

3. Priority 3 · Accelerate

   Static files cached for 30 days or more

   Observed: A same-site stylesheet or script was cacheable for 95 seconds, 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.

   48% of Weather Forecast peers do this.

   Guide: Browser Caching Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · Enable

   XML sitemap discoverable

   Observed: No sitemap was listed in robots.txt or found at /sitemap.xml.

   What to do: Generate an XML sitemap of canonical URLs, reference it in robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console.

   66% of Weather Forecast peers do this.

   Guide: XML Sitemap Guide: Include Only URLs You Stand Behind

What weather.gov already does well

Practices fewer than half of Weather Forecast peers use.

• DNSSEC signedDNSSEC delegation (DS record) present.12% of peers
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.22% of peers
• Referrer-Policy setReferrer-Policy present.27% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.weather.gov/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

Let's Encrypt, 89-day validity, expiring 2026-12-08

DNS operators

Akamai Edge DNS

HSTS

max-age 365 days, includeSubDomains, preload

DMARC policy

p=reject

Homepage HTML

124 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

12 (png 12)

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 Weather Forecast sites

• emergencyemail.org49
• meteo.be50
• meteofrance.com49
• meteomaroc.com51
• weather.gc.ca51

Weather Forecast readiness benchmark