Domain check score

How the public domain check calculates: four weighted areas, deductions per finding, an overall score from 0 to 100 and recommendations ranked by gain.

On this page

The domain check with its score

The public domain check on the home page bundles 19 individual checks into four areas, each with a score from 0 to 100, and weights them into the total score. It uses the same checks as the monitors, but once and without history; the dashboard has no score, there the state from the open incidents counts.

  • Areas and weights: Website 30% (certificate, redirects, security headers, IPv6, security.txt, privacy: third parties before consent), Email 35% (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, TLS-RPT, BIMI), DNS 20% (records, DNSSEC, name servers, CAA), Domain 15% (registration, blacklists). DNS propagation and "Website down?" are not part of it; they are linked as more checks below the result.
  • Score per area: 100 minus the deductions of its checks. Per check, critical findings cost 20 points, warnings 7 points (at most 20), hints 1 point (at most 3). In the six additional checks IPv6, security.txt, privacy, name servers, CAA and BIMI hints cost nothing: missing BIMI, no security.txt, no CAA record or no IPv6 carry no deduction, only real problems such as an expired security.txt, a CAA record that locks out your own CA or lame name servers count. Without an IPv6 route at the checking location the IPv6 check only lists the AAAA records, without a finding. The checks run side by side (at most six at a time, each with a 12-second timeout, the blacklist with 25) within a time budget of 45 seconds; checks skipped because of it drop out of the calculation. If a part could not check because of an error, there is no score.
  • Total score: weighted average of the areas. Grades: 90 and above excellent, 70 and above good, 50 and above fair, below that urgent action needed.
  • Recommendations: up to five findings, sorted by the points gained by fixing them. The gain follows from the share of the finding in the deduction of its check, the weight of the area and the recommendation from the finding text; on a tie critical comes before warning.
  • Limits: 20 queries per hour and IP, results cached for five minutes, result page not indexed but shareable.

See also: Try the domain check