www.gov.uk

Readiness by lane

Green: www.gov.uk. Thin bar: Government Services peer median.

Priority fixes for www.gov.uk

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

1. Priority 1 · Harden

   DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

   Observed: No DMARC record was found at _dmarc.www.gov.uk.

   Why it matters: An enforcing DMARC policy helps receiving mail systems reject email that falsely claims to come from your domain, a common route for phishing your customers.

   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. Limit: Read from public DNS at the time of the check; records may have changed since.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

2. Priority 2 · Accelerate

   Modern image formats in use

   Observed: The homepage had 4 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.

   15% of Government Services peers do this.

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

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   CAA records limit who can issue certificates

   Observed: No CAA record was found for www.gov.uk, so any public certificate authority may issue for it.

   What to do: Publish CAA records naming every CA you actually use, including the CAs your CDN uses for managed certificates. Add an iodef contact if you want reports.

   17% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

4. Priority 4 · Harden

   Certificate lifetime of 100 days or less

   Observed: The certificate from GlobalSign nv-sa had a 396-day validity period, longer than the 100-day maximum that applies from March 2027.

   What to do: Move to automated issuance and renewal now, while you still have time to test it.

   34% of Government Services peers do this.

   Guide: HTTPS and TLS Guide for Website Owners

What www.gov.uk already does well

Practices fewer than half of Government Services peers use.

• security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.8% of peers
• HTTP/3 advertisedHTTP/3 advertised.11% of peers
• Reachable over IPv6IPv6 address published.27% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.gov.uk/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

GlobalSign, 396-day validity, expiring 2026-12-28

CDN or edge

Fastly

HSTS

max-age 365 days, preload

Homepage HTML

84 KB, br

Images on homepage

4 (png 4)

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

• comfama.com83
• cpf.gov.sg82
• justice.gov81
• wien.gv.at82
• xn--80aapampemcchfmo7a3c9ehj.xn--p1ai82

Government Services readiness benchmark