zdfheute.de

Readiness by lane

Green: zdfheute.de. Thin bar: News & Media peer median.

Priority fixes for zdfheute.de

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

1. Priority 1 · Harden

   HSTS kept for at least a year

   Observed: The homepage response did not include a Strict-Transport-Security header.

   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.

   On Next.js: Add the header in the headers() option of next.config.js for all routes.

   35% of News & Media 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 163 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 Next.js: The next/image component serves optimized formats automatically.

   44% of News & Media peers do this.

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

3. Priority 3 · Harden

   DMARC policy enforces quarantine or reject

   Observed: No DMARC record was found at _dmarc.zdfheute.de.

   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.

   37% of News & Media peers do this.

   Guide: A Practical Website Health Check for Owners

4. Priority 4 · Accelerate

   No render-blocking scripts in <head>

   Observed: The homepage <head> loaded 1 external script 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 Next.js: Use the next/script component with an appropriate loading strategy.

   42% of News & Media peers do this.

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

What zdfheute.de already does well

Practices fewer than half of News & Media peers use.

• security.txt publishedsecurity.txt with a contact found.6.2% of peers
• Nameservers spread across providersNameservers spread across more than one operator.11% of peers
• Content Security Policy presentContent-Security-Policy present.29% of peers

What we saw

Homepage checked

https://www.zdfheute.de/

Homepage response

HTTP 200

TLS

TLSv1.3, HTTP/2

Certificate

DigiCert, 198-day validity, expiring 2027-02-07

Platform or framework

Next.js

DNS operators

Akamai Edge DNS, plus 1 self-run or other nameserver domain

Homepage HTML

1,694 KB, gzip

Images on homepage

163 (svg 3)

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 News & Media sites

• 0352.ua70
• aajtak.in70
• xsmb123.com71
• yabiladi.com71
• yenisafak.com71

News & Media readiness benchmark