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Infrastructure

· 9 checks — DNS, redirects, IPv6, crawlability, URL variants, and domain intelligence rolled into one auditable list.
SCORE
83
GRADE
B
FIX
1
REVIEW
5
PASS
3
INFO
0
Probed from Madrid, Spain
301 Moved Permanently
Checks
9
3 PASS 5 REVIEW 1 FIX
D
CDN & Delivery
Action
No CDN detected
FIX
No CDN detected
Warning::
No CDN detected
A CDN can significantly improve load times for users around the world by caching content at edge nodes closer to them.
No CDN detected

Consider using a CDN to improve global delivery speed and reduce origin load.

B
Redirect Chain
1 redirect(s), 2974 ms total
REVIEW
1 redirect(s), 2974 ms total
Info::
Single redirect
Got: https://mercurynews.com → https://www.mercurynews.com/ (301)
Info::
WWW normalization redirect
Warning::
Redirect overhead: 2974 ms total
Got: 2974 ms

https://mercurynews.com

1062 ms · HTTP/1.1

301

https://www.mercurynews.com/

1911 ms · HTTP/1.1 FINAL

#URLStatusTimeProtocolServer
1https://mercurynews.com3011062 msHTTP/1.1nginx
2https://www.mercurynews.com/2001911 msHTTP/1.1nginx

See the visual redirect chain in the HTTP Probe tab →

C
IPv6 Readiness
Action
No IPv6 support
REVIEW
No IPv6 support
Info::
No IPv6 (AAAA) records found
IPv6 support is increasingly important for global accessibility. About 40% of internet users have IPv6 connectivity.
No IPv6 Support
About 40% of internet users have IPv6. Consider adding AAAA records.

IPv6 support is increasingly important for global accessibility. About 40% of internet users have IPv6 connectivity.

Why this matters

No AAAA records — same impact as 'no IPv6 (AAAA) records'; IPv6-preferring clients pay extra latency falling back to IPv4.

Source: Google IPv6 stats

B
URL Variants
www/non-www, trailing slash, HTTP→HTTPS
REVIEW
www/non-www, trailing slash, HTTP→HTTPS
Critical::
Both www and non-www versions serve content
Got: Both variants return 200 Expected: One variant 301-redirects to the other
Info::
HTTP correctly 301-redirects to HTTPS

www / non-www

200https://www.mercurynews.com/
200https://mercurynews.com/

Inconsistent — duplicate content risk

HTTP → HTTPS

301http://mercurynews.com/ → https://mercurynews.com/

Consistent

B
HTTP Probe Timing
Total 1160 ms — DNS, TCP, TLS, TTFB, content transfer breakdown
REVIEW
DNS Lookup DNS Lookup — time to resolve the domain name to an IP address.
38 ms
TCP Connect TCP Connect — time to establish a TCP connection to the server.
0 ms
TLS Handshake TLS Handshake — time to complete the HTTPS encryption handshake.
3 ms
Time to First Byte Time to First Byte — how long the server takes to respond with the first byte of data.
1.16 s
Total Time Total request time from DNS lookup through full response.
1.16 s

Connection waterfall

DNS Lookup 38 ms TCP Connect 0 ms TLS Handshake 3 ms Server Processing 1.12 s Content Transfer 0 ms
B
TLS Certificate Expiry & Recommendations
76 days until leaf cert expires — 3 issues to address
REVIEW

Certificate validity

76
days left
0d 30d 60d 90d+

Recommended actions

  • Add the preload directive and submit to hstspreload.org once max-age + includeSubDomains are in place
  • Enable DNSSEC on your domain for DNS spoofing protection
  • Enable OCSP stapling on your TLS server to remove a CA roundtrip and protect user privacy
A+
DNS Records
1 A records, 113 ms lookup
PASS
1 A records, 113 ms lookup
Info::
Resolves to 1 IPv4 address(es)
Got: 192.0.66.2
Info::
Single A record — no DNS redundancy
Multiple A records provide failover if one server goes down.
Info::
No IPv6 (AAAA) records
Info::
4 nameserver(s) configured
Got: ns-1650.awsdns-14.co.uk, ns-114.awsdns-14.com, ns-1021.awsdns-63.net, ns-1070.awsdns-05.org
Info::
5 mail exchanger(s) configured
Info::
CAA records not checked
CAA record lookup requires a specialized DNS resolver. This check will be available in a future update.
Info::
SPF record present in TXT
Info::
DNS resolution time: 113 ms
Got: 113 ms
A192.0.66.2
AAAA—
CNAME—
NSns-1650.awsdns-14.co.uk, ns-114.awsdns-14.com, ns-1021.awsdns-63.net, ns-1070.awsdns-05.org
MX
10 aspmx.l.google.com
20 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com
20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com
30 aspmx2.googlemail.com
30 aspmx3.googlemail.com
TXT
google-site-verification=jvnaFa4kq5tUDhFMQZ84bDI74A2qnu0gfhxZjZXlkko
google-site-verification=IBuiEqAaXT9PMPVWqOxfMd52-1NWibTg5tHIpl01as4
1lhc1bmucsjp7q8b91t87nhm01
_globalsign-domain-verification=qu9bswx7_efyr0AnoYMkd0ZmvFdZNxur1nGSq55P5P
s0jia8r3orr0ohg55gr7ok29vh
6vomq0c163icdj3t46dm5ik0f3
1lhc1bmucsjp7q8b91t87nhm01.
google-site-verification=te069tSedXCnj6jCVSo5LvPV-pX5JH5yeyLbE0pz2zE
knowbe4-site-verification=a9ce6449edf2d51c41eed1f3517d26f9
m5qr4jpvbhj6i96vu42ongro1k
l33i9ps6uk6nrl89kmadg4ms3d
globalsign-domain-verification=wdsjy5b1d3sGjlpf2ZSfdpjPcsNrXC_iOKH4GEnR0_
tollbit-domain-verification=8203027deba5d6dc21912ea0658c7c1adf927e9798c2f6bcfacd...
tb02sb7m6lidjb74qlclp0nq29
_globalsign-domain-verification=_OUsAbDOaFYPYWOgAjdN9k-kV76av1Rf5Pg4XHx3dL
SPF v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:_spfbang.digitalfirstmedia.com include:am...
36ailchom7s11o20nu6uqgo69o
3mmibbsavpv6o2hkq39uqhsr49
llib6qvjasng0m5c7562bvdl78
_globalsign-domain-verification=0TyIZcbLmgSwoVohQ9GWaLbZq22eAkpviTlcN7JXo3
facebook-domain-verification=rhu5s1i15r1vqowtioy7vrrcaljnkn
17vm7b9n6t7l4r697abed5mt5j
CAALookup not available with standard resolver
Resolved in 113 ms

Multiple A records provide failover if one server goes down.

Why this matters

Single A record means a single point of failure — if that IP goes down, your site is unreachable until DNS TTL expires.

Learn more ▾

Add multiple A records for round-robin failover, or use a managed DNS provider with health-checked failover (Route 53, Cloudflare, NS1). Short TTL (60-300s) lets clients recover faster on outages.

Source: SRE practice / DNS architecture

CAA record lookup requires a specialized DNS resolver. This check will be available in a future update.

Why this matters

Informational: CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) records weren't checked in this scan.

A+
Crawlability
robots.txt present, sitemap with 8838 URLs
PASS
robots.txt present, sitemap with 8838 URLs
Info::
robots.txt is present
Got: 4322 bytes
Info::
sitemap.xml is present
Info::
sitemap.xml is valid XML
Info::
sitemap.xml contains 8838 entries
Info::
Sitemap index with 8838 child sitemaps
Info::
robots.txt references sitemap
robots.txt 200 OK
Size 4322 B Sitemaps referenced 1 User-agents Bytespider, carbon-umbrella-bot, Cohere-training-data-crawler, Google-Extended, DuckAssistBot, omgili, Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; NewsRoom.BI/0.1; +http://www.newsroom.bi/bot.html), ICC-Crawler, Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA51N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.67 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; mrfCompass-Jukebox/1.0), LCC, Mantisbot, Perplexity-User, Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EchoboxBot/1.0; hash/w4mwnpbXf3MFAbxOkJRw; +http://www.echobox.com), Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; mrfCompass-Marshall/1.0), Webzio-extended, YandexBot, ChatGPT-User, grok-crawler, PetalBot, facebookexternalhit, Amazonbot, CCBot, DocSpotBot, anthropic-ai, Cotoyogi, laion-huggingface-processor, VelenPublicWebCrawler, Ai2Bot-Dolma, Baiduspider, PanguBot, Vivaldi, Twitterbot, GPTBot, Claude-User, Timpibot, Archive.org_bot, Diffbot, ia_archiver-web.archive.org, AmazonAdBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-Searchbot, SBIntuitionsBot, grapeshot, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, Dalvik, imageSpider, Kangaroo Bot, Meta-ExternalAgent, MistralAI-User, netEstate Imprint Crawler, Spider, Thinkbot, Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA51N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.67 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; mrfCompass-Booldog/1.0), *, Brightbot 1.0, FacebookBot, GnowitNewsbot, OAI-SearchBot, Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.153 Safari/537.36 (compatible; mrfCompass-Booldog/1.0), AI2Bot, Datenbank Crawler, SirdataBot, Applebot-Extended Blocking No — crawling allowed
# Our Content is made available for your personal, non-commercial use subject to our Terms of Service here: https://www.medianewsgroup.com/terms-of-use/
# Any other uses are prohibited, including but not limited to:
# (1) text and data mining activities under Art. 4 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market;
# (2) use of any Content or information available on the Site for purposes of retrieval augmented generation, grounding, training, or development of machine learning models, algorithms, or artificial intelligence (AI) systems, or to generate substitute content or develop any products, services, or technology;
# (3) caching or archiving the Content; and/or
# (4) any commercial purposes.
# Contact us at https://www.mercurynews.com/contact-us/ for assistance.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Disallow: /*?returnUrl=
Disallow: /*?s=
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /*/page/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /comments/

User-agent: AI2Bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Ai2Bot-Dolma
Disallow: /

User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: anthropic-ai
Disallow: /

User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: Archive.org_bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /

User-agent: Brightbot 1.0
Disallow: /

User-Agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /

User-agent: carbon-umbrella-bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Claude-Searchbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Claude-User
Disallow: /

User-agent: Claude-Web
Disallow: /

User-agent: Cohere-training-data-crawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: Cotoyogi
Disallow: /

User-agent: Dalvik
Disallow: /

User-agent: Datenbank Crawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: Diffbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: DocSpotBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: DuckAssistBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: GnowitNewsbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: grok-crawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: ia_archiver-web.archive.org
Disallow: /

User-agent: ICC-Crawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: imageSpider
Disallow: /

User-agent: Kangaroo Bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: laion-huggingface-processor
Disallow: /

User-agent: LCC
Disallow: /

User-agent: Mantisbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
Disallow: /

User-agent: MistralAI-User
Disallow: /

User-agent: netEstate Imprint Crawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: omgili
Disallow: /

User-agent: PanguBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

User-agent: PetalBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: SBIntuitionsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: SirdataBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Spider
Disallow: /

User-agent: Thinkbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Timpibot
Disallow: /

User-agent: VelenPublicWebCrawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: Vivaldi
Disallow: /

User-agent: Webzio-extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: YandexBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: AmazonAdBot
Disallow:

User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow:

User-agent: grapeshot
Disallow:

User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EchoboxBot/1.0; hash/w4mwnpbXf3MFAbxOkJRw; +http://www.echobox.com)
Disallow:

User-agent: Twitterbot
Disallow:

User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; NewsRoom.BI/0.1; +http://www.newsroom.bi/bot.html)
Allow: /
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA51N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.67 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; mrfCompass-Booldog/1.0)
Allow: /
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.153 Safari/537.36 (compatible; mrfCompass-Booldog/1.0)
Allow: /
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; mrfCompass-Marshall/1.0)
Allow: /
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA51N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.67 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; mrfCompass-Jukebox/1.0)
Allow: /
# Sitemap archive
Sitemap: https://www.mercurynews.com/sitemap.xml
sitemap.xml 200 OK
Type Sitemap Index URLs 8838 entries Valid XML Yes
Child Sitemaps:
A+
Domain Intelligence
mercurynews.com — via CSC Corporate Domains, Inc., 30 years, 1 months old, hosted on WordPress.com (Automattic)
PASS
mercurynews.com — via CSC Corporate Domains, Inc., 30 years, 1 months old, hosted on WordPress.com (Automattic)
Info::
Domain registered until Aug 18, 2026 (3 months remaining)
Info::
DNSSEC is not enabled
DNSSEC protects against DNS spoofing attacks. While not required, enabling DNSSEC adds an additional layer of security. Contact your DNS provider to enable it.
Info::
Registrar: CSC Corporate Domains, Inc.
Warning::
Registrar lock is NOT enabled
The domain can be transferred without an unlock step. Enable registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) in your registrar's control panel to protect against unauthorized or accidental transfers.
Info::
Hosting: WordPress.com (Automattic)
Got: AS2635
Domain expiry

33 days

August 18, 2026

SSL certificate

76 days

Issued by Let's Encrypt

Domain age

30 years, 1 months

Registered August 19, 1996

DNSSEC

Not enabled

Protects against DNS spoofing

Hosting

WordPress.com (Automattic)

ASN AS2635

192.0.66.2

Registrar

CSC Corporate Domains, Inc.

Unlocked 4 NS records
Expiry timeline
Today
+1 year
Domain expiry SSL expiry Danger zone (≤30 days)
Recommended actions
  • Renew the domain or enable auto-renewal to prevent accidental expiry
  • Enable DNSSEC to protect visitors from DNS spoofing
  • Enable registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) to block unauthorized domain transfers
Registrar CSC Corporate Domains, Inc.
Created August 19, 1996 (30 years, 1 months ago)
Expires August 18, 2026 (3 months)
Last Updated April 6, 2026
Name Servers ns-1021.awsdns-63.net, ns-1070.awsdns-05.org, ns-114.awsdns-14.com, ns-1650.awsdns-14.co.uk
DNSSEC Not enabled
Hosting
IP Address 192.0.66.2
ASN AS2635 (AUTOMATTIC - Automattic, Inc, US)
Provider WordPress.com (Automattic)
Data source: rdap (0.3s)

DNSSEC protects against DNS spoofing attacks. While not required, enabling DNSSEC adds an additional layer of security. Contact your DNS provider to enable it.

Why this matters

Without DNSSEC, an attacker who can poison your DNS can hijack your domain — and SSL certs alone don't stop them.

Learn more ▾

DNSSEC adds cryptographic signatures to DNS records, preventing forged responses from poisoning resolver caches. Without it, an attacker who controls the network path can redirect your domain to a malicious server before any HTTPS handshake happens. Most modern registrars (Cloudflare, Google Domains, Route 53) enable it with one toggle.

Source: ICANN / RFC 4033

The domain can be transferred without an unlock step. Enable registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) in your registrar's control panel to protect against unauthorized or accidental transfers.

Why this matters

Without registrar lock, an attacker who phishes your registrar credentials can transfer the domain in minutes — total brand hijack.

Learn more ▾

Registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited, clientUpdateProhibited, clientDeleteProhibited) requires extra verification before any transfer/update/delete. Every major registrar offers it free. Combined with 2FA on your registrar account, it's the strongest defense against domain hijacking.

Source: ICANN / domain-security best practice

All checks on this page are automated. Results are estimates - run targeted manual reviews when the score affects a release decision.

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