theguardian.com
Latest news, sport and opinion from the Guardian
2 failed · 7 warnings · 20 passed
Audited Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:15:52 GMT · https://www.theguardian.com/international
Meta & Head
19.4/25
Title, description, canonical, social tags — what search engines read first.
Open Graph tagsmedium impactlow effort
No Open Graph tags found
Open Graph tags control how your page looks when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp, and most chat apps; without them, links render as a bare URL or with guessed text, and far fewer people click through. Add four meta tags to <head>: og:title, og:description, og:url, and og:image — an image around 1200x630 pixels works well across platforms. Use absolute https:// URLs for og:image and og:url; relative paths are the most common reason preview images silently fail to appear.
Meta descriptionhigh impactlow effort
Meta description is "Latest international news, sport and comment from the Guardian" (62 characters)
Search engines truncate descriptions past roughly 160 characters, and very short ones waste the snippet space that persuades searchers to pick your listing over the next one. Rewrite it to 70–160 characters: state what the page offers, work the primary keyword in naturally (matching words get bolded in results), and end with a benefit or call to action. Don't cram in keywords — the description influences clicks, not rankings, so write it for humans.
Twitter card taglow impactlow effort
No twitter:card meta tag found
X (Twitter) layers its own card markup on top of Open Graph, and without a twitter:card tag your shared links may render as plain text instead of a large image preview. Add <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> alongside your Open Graph tags; X will fill in the title, description, and picture from og:title, og:description, and og:image. Keep og:image an absolute URL — a relative or missing image is the usual reason cards show up without a picture.
6 passing checks
- Title tag<title> is "Latest news, sport and opinion from the Guardian" (48 characters)
- Canonical URLCanonical href is "https://www.theguardian.com"
- Viewport meta tagViewport is "width=device-width,minimum-scale=1,initial-scale=1"
- Character encoding declaredCharacter encoding is declared
- FaviconA <link rel="icon"> is present
- Page allows indexingrobots: max-image-preview:large
Content & Structure
18.8/25
Headings, copy depth, images, structured data, internal linking.
Single H1 headinghigh impactlow effort
0 h1 headings found
The h1 is the visible headline of the page and one of the clearest signals to search engines of what it's about; with none present, engines lean on surrounding text and may misread the topic. Add exactly one h1 near the top that states the main topic in plain language and includes the primary keyword, e.g. <h1>Merge PDF Files Online</h1>. Don't fake it with a styled <div> — the semantic tag itself is what crawlers and screen readers actually read.
Structured data (JSON-LD)medium impactmedium effort
No JSON-LD structured data blocks found
Structured data makes your listing eligible for rich results — star ratings, FAQs, breadcrumbs, product prices — which occupy more space on the results page and draw more clicks than plain blue links. Add a <script type="application/ld+json"> block with a schema.org type that matches the page: Organization or WebSite for a homepage, Article for posts, Product for product pages. Only mark up content actually visible on the page — markup for invisible content violates Google's guidelines and can earn a manual action.
6 passing checks
- Heading hierarchy195 headings in order without skipped levels
- Word count4617 words of visible text
- Image alt text111 of 112 images have alt text
- HTML lang attribute<html lang="en">
- JavaScript-dependent contentvisible text ~20177 chars in the initial HTML
- Internal linking313 internal, 28 external links
Technical
21.6/25
HTTPS, redirects, robots, sitemap, speed, crawlability.
Short redirect chainmedium impactlow effort
https://theguardian.com/ (301) → https://www.theguardian.com/ (302) → https://www.theguardian.com/international
Every redirect hop adds a round-trip before the visitor sees anything, each hop can leak a little link equity, and crawlers abandon long chains — which can leave the destination page undiscovered. Trace the chain above and point the first URL directly at the final destination in a single 301; commonly this means merging separate http-to-https and non-www-to-www rules into one combined redirect. Also update internal links to reference the final URL directly, so most visitors never enter the chain at all.
XML sitemap availablemedium impactlow effort
no sitemap.xml found
Without an XML sitemap, search engines discover pages only by following links, so new, deep, or weakly linked pages get found slowly or not at all. Generate one at /sitemap.xml — most frameworks and CMSs have a generator built in or as a plugin — listing every canonical, indexable URL, then add "Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml" to robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console. Keep it clean: listing redirected, noindexed, or 404 URLs erodes crawler trust in the whole file.
Response compression enabledlow impactlow effort
no content-encoding header
This HTML is served uncompressed, so every visitor downloads far more bytes than necessary — text compresses extremely well, and the savings directly speed up first render on slow connections. Enable Brotli or gzip on your server or CDN: in nginx it's "gzip on;" (or the brotli module), in Apache it's mod_deflate via .htaccess, and on most CDNs it's a single toggle. Make sure compression covers all text types (HTML, CSS, JS, JSON, SVG), but skip already-compressed images — recompressing them wastes CPU for no gain.
Reasonable HTML sizelow impactmedium effort
1.3 MB
A very large HTML document slows parsing on every visit and risks exceeding the portion of a file crawlers are willing to fetch — content past the cutoff may simply never be indexed. Slim it down: move large inline <script> and <style> blocks into external cacheable files, strip embedded JSON data blobs and base64-encoded images, and paginate or lazy-load very long listings. Check the most common culprit first: a framework serializing the entire page state or dataset into the document itself.
8 passing checks
- Served over HTTPSfinal URL uses https://
- HTTP redirects to HTTPShttp:// redirects to https://
- No mixed content0 http:// subresource references
- robots.txt present and permissiverobots.txt exists and allows crawling
- Fast time to first byte684 ms
- Missing pages return 404missing paths return HTTP 404/410
- www and non-www resolve consistentlywww and non-www converge on the same host
- HTML5 doctype<!DOCTYPE html> present
Performance
Core Web Vitals scoring via Google PageSpeed is coming soon.
Share your score
Embed this live badge on your site — it updates whenever the audit is re-run.