How to Improve the Security of Your Netlify Site
The initial security assessment of my Netlify site
As with many times before, I entered one of my websites for the check of the security-relevant HTTP headers on securityheaders.com. The result came back quickly and showed there is a potential to improve the headers. Only Grade D according to Scott Helme’s site:
Easy to improve with Netlify’s _headers file
The outstanding Netlify developer experience makes it very easy to tweak the headers. Netlify allows you to set additional headers in a file called “_headers”. This file should live in your “Publish directory”. This is often called “public/”, “dist/” or “_site”. If you are unsure you can check it in the Netlify admin panel of your site under “Build & Deploy”.
The headers file allows you to define headers for different URLs (for example “/contact”) or URL segments (for example “/*” for all URLs) of your page. In my case it’s very simple as I want to apply the headers to all pages (URLs):
/*
X-Frame-Options: DENY
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Referrer-Policy: no-referrer
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff`_headers`-file example used on peterthaleikis.com
With these headers I get a significantly improved result and a “Grade A”:
Securityheaders result of my website after tweaking _headers
Adding the header file to your git, pushing it up and deploying shouldn’t take more than five minutes and improves the security of your website. I would think these are well invested minutes 🙏️
