hawaii.gov scored 67 on Inspectrosite. The portal behind it scored 91.
By Johnny · Byteslip · scans run and Hawaii time (HST)
After google.com and wikipedia.org, I wanted something closer to home here in Hilo, so I pointed Inspectrosite at hawaii.gov, the State of Hawaiʻi’s short address. It came back with 67, grade C. That number is real, but it isn’t a score of the homepage you see. So I scanned the page hawaii.gov sends you to, portal.ehawaii.gov, and that one scored 91, grade A, with zero fails.
Quick disclosure: Inspectrosite is Byteslip’s own free browser tool. The badges above are just pictures of the scores from our scans, not proof of anything (anyone can type a number into a badge link). The real record is the scan itself: re-run hawaii.gov or re-run portal.ehawaii.gov.
What hawaii.gov actually returns
When we scanned google.com and wikipedia.org, each server answered with an HTTP redirect, and Inspectrosite followed it to the real homepage. hawaii.gov didn’t do that. https://hawaii.gov/ returned HTTP 200 and stayed at the same URL. What came back was a 774-byte HTML file, served through Cloudflare, with a last-modified date of Thu, 20 Oct 2016. Here is the HTML (a Cloudflare challenge script is also injected in the body):
<html>
<head>
<title>
</title>
<META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://portal.ehawaii.gov">
</head>
<body>That meta-refresh tells the browser to go to http://portal.ehawaii.gov after 0 seconds. You never notice it. One small detail: the target is plain HTTP, not HTTPS.
Inspectrosite follows HTTP redirects, but it doesn’t follow meta-refresh. So it scored the hop file itself. It ran 50 checks: 20 passed, 11 warned, 9 failed, and 10 were info only. The fetch took 821 ms (including our proxy). The page has 1 inline script, 0 images, 0 stylesheets, 0 links, 0 forms, and 0 visible words.
Why the hop page got 67
All nine fails are what you’d expect from a nearly empty file whose only job is to bounce you somewhere else. Grouped:
Missing <doctype html>, <html lang>, and <meta charset>
The file opens with a bare
<html>tag. There’s no doctype, no language, and no charset declared in the markup. (The server header does say UTF-8; the check looks at the HTML.)Missing mobile viewport meta
No viewport tag, so a phone would render it at desktop width. Nobody sees it for long, but the check doesn’t know that.
Missing <title> and meta description
The
<title>tag is there but empty, and there’s no description. In a search result or a browser tab this page has nothing to say.No <h1> heading, and 0/4 landmarks (header, nav, main, footer)
There is no visible content at all — 0 words, 0 images, 0 links. So no heading and no page structure.
Uses <meta http-equiv=refresh> redirect
This is the one that explains the rest. Inspectrosite flags meta-refresh redirects because a real HTTP redirect (301/302) is clearer for browsers, assistive tech, and search engines.
Its 11 warnings follow the same pattern: no canonical URL, no favicon, no theme-color, no headings at all, 0/3 Open Graph tags, no Twitter/X card, very little visible text (~0 words), and no HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff, clickjacking protection, or referrer policy headers. It still passes basics like HTTP 200 over HTTPS, and robots.txt allows the path with no noindex.
The page people actually see: 91, no fails
Then I scanned https://portal.ehawaii.gov/ directly. No redirect, HTTP 200. The title is “The Official Website of the Aloha State | Hawaii.gov” and its one <h1> reads “Aloha, welcome to hawaii.gov The official website of the Aloha State.” It ran 52 checks: 37 passed, 10 warned, 0 failed, and 5 were info only. The HTML came back in 595 ms (including our proxy), the document was a lean 33.6 KB (34,375 bytes), and the page had 6 scripts (2 external, 4 inline), 1 image, 1 stylesheet, 89 links, 2 forms, and about 370 words of visible text.
No fails, but ten warnings. Grouped:
- Head and social tags: the meta description is quite short (39 chars). There’s no Twitter/X card tag, and the social preview tags disagree with the page —
og:descriptionshares no words with the meta description. - Markup: 1 inline event handler (
onclick=…), 1 image missing width/height, and 4 empty links. - Security headers: no HSTS header, no
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff, no clickjacking protection, and no referrer policy.
What looked solid on the portal
Info-only notes, not scored: no robots.txt (HTTP 404, which indexing treats as no restrictions), no CSP, no skip link, and no JSON-LD. Inspectrosite also spotted Google Analytics / Tag Manager and an AmazonS3 server header. That’s informational; no stack scores better or worse.
67 vs 91, and the other two notes
Inspectrosite’s score is an average of the checks that count: a pass is worth 100, a warning 60, a fail 0, and info checks are left out. So 91 tells you how one page did on our checklist. It isn’t a grade for the State of Hawaiʻi, and it says nothing about how good its services are. Same for the 67: it’s a score of the hop file, not of the homepage.
Side by side with the earlier notes, the portal’s 91 with no fails is the strongest of the three homepages: google.com scored 75 (C, five fails) and wikipedia.org scored 89 (B, one fail). The difference at the front door is the hop. A plain HTTP redirect from hawaii.gov to the HTTPS portal would let tools like this one land on the real page.
Scores change
These are two scans, taken at 2:35 AM and 2:36 AM Hawaii time (HST) on November 6, 2026. The state can change its pages, and Inspectrosite gets updates too, so a scan today might come out different. Re-scan hawaii.gov, re-scan portal.ehawaii.gov, or try your own site.