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Security report for appcues.com

Appcues · Technology · United States

Medium risk. 4 critical or high findings in Security headers and GDPR outside view.

Security score

72/100

Risk levelMedium

0–100, higher is better. How it is calculated

Appcues is a well-established SaaS company founded in 2013, specializing in user engagement platforms tailored for SaaS businesses. Their website demonstrates a strong market position with over 1,500 customers and offers a comprehensive suite of services including in-app messaging, workflows, email campaigns, data analytics, and push notifications. The site is professionally designed, mobile-optimized, and rich in content, including customer testimonials and case studies that reinforce trust and credibility. Technically, the website leverages modern technologies such as Webflow, Segment, Hotjar, and integrates multiple analytics and marketing tools, hosted primarily on AWS infrastructure. Security-wise, the site uses HTTPS with modern TLS protocols and has a DMARC policy in place, but lacks some recommended security headers and HSTS, which are areas for improvement. Privacy and cookie policies are present and indicate GDPR compliance, with consent mechanisms implemented. Overall, the website is secure, professional, and trustworthy, with minor recommendations to enhance security headers and SSL configurations.

Scanned

This is an earlier scan of appcues.com. View the latest report

NIS2 and GDPR posture

GDPR outside view
43/ 100 · High
Checks completed
7of 7

NIS2 Art. 21(2)

  1. (a) Risk analysis and security policies: Not visible from outside
  2. (b) Incident handling: One indicator
  3. (c) Business continuity, backups and crisis management: Not visible from outside
  4. (d) Supply chain security: Not visible from outside
  5. (e) Secure acquisition, development and maintenance, including vulnerability handling: Partly checked
  6. (f) Assessing the effectiveness of security measures: Not visible from outside
  7. (g) Cyber hygiene and security training: Not visible from outside
  8. (h) Cryptography and encryption: Partly checked
  9. (i) HR security, access control and asset management: One indicator
  10. (j) Multi-factor authentication and secured communications: Not visible from outside

This scan rated NIS2 with an earlier keyword method that is no longer shown; rescan for the per-article view. Risk management, continuity, supply chain, training, MFA, management oversight (Art. 20) and incident reporting (Art. 23) need internal evidence, and Guard cannot tell whether NIS2 applies to this organisation.

GDPR is indicative only, based on publicly visible signals: Articles 7, 12, 13 and 32 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive. Not a certification or legal assessment.

Priority findings

4 findings rated critical or high. Fix these first.

  1. Security headers

    Security headers are instructions your web server sends to every visitor’s browser. Missing ones leave visitors more exposed to attacks such as clickjacking and injected scripts.

    • High

      Missing Strict-Transport-Security header

      Forces HTTPS connections

      What to do: Add "Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload"

      • CWE-319
      • OWASP A04:2025
      • ASVS V3.4.1
    • High

      Missing X-Frame-Options header

      Prevents clickjacking attacks

      What to do: Add "X-Frame-Options: DENY" or "X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN"

  2. GDPR outside view

    These are the privacy signals visitors and data protection authorities look for under GDPR.

    • High

      No Cookie Policy found

      GDPR requires clear information about cookie usage

      What to do: Add a dedicated cookie policy explaining cookie usage and purposes

    • High

      No Cookie Consent Banner found

      GDPR requires explicit consent for non-essential cookies

      What to do: Implement a cookie consent banner that appears on first visit

Need hands-on remediation? Email guard@offseq.com

Keep watching appcues.com

This scan found 21 issues across 6 checks. Monitoring re-runs those checks daily, emails you when something material changes and records each fix, so you can show progress.

Daily monitoring

Recommended

€25per month

  • TLS certificates and expiry
  • DNS records
  • SPF, DKIM and DMARC
  • Security headers
  • GDPR and NIS2 posture
  • Exposed services
  • Third-party trackers
  • Security score drift

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Results by check

Each check with its score, findings and the evidence it collected.

How this score is calculated

The security score runs 0–100, higher is better. It is the plain average of the security checks that completed in this scan, each counted equally. A check that could not run is left out: it counts neither as a pass nor as a fail.

Counted in this score

SSL/TLS
87
Security headers
30
Email security
85
DNS health
85
Network security
100
GDPR outside view
43
Average
72

Not counted

  • NIS2 outside view: Re-weights evidence from the TLS, email, DNS, network and hygiene checks, so counting it would count that evidence twice. Shown on its own.
  • OffSeq Observations: An AI reading of the site, useful context but not reproducible evidence. Shown on its own.

Findings that cap the score at 49

Each of these is serious on its own, so while any is present the site cannot rate better than high risk, however good the other checks are.

  • The certificate is not trusted by browsers
  • The website is not served over HTTPS
  • A database, remote desktop, file-sharing or Telnet service is reachable from the internet
  • The page loads a script from a compromised source
  • The domain registration has expired
  • SPF authorises every server to send mail as the domain

Partial scans

When the site blocks Guard or most checks cannot run, the score covers only the checks that ran (usually DNS and email), is capped at 75 and is shown as partial, without a risk level.

Risk levels

  • Critical0–25
  • High26–49
  • Medium50–75
  • Low76–100

Technical appendix

Business context, site observations and technical notes gathered during the scan, and the standards behind each reference.

Business context

Business profile

Appcues operates in the technology sector, focusing on SaaS product adoption and user engagement. Their business model is subscription-based SaaS, targeting product teams and SaaS companies aiming to improve user activation, retention, and feature adoption. The company has a strong ecosystem of integrations with platforms like Heap, HubSpot, and Segment, enhancing its value proposition. Their marketing strategy includes extensive use of analytics, customer success stories, and educational resources such as the Product Adoption Academy. The company maintains a consistent brand presence and demonstrates growth through customer testimonials and case studies highlighting significant performance improvements. No parent or subsidiary companies were identified, indicating a focused standalone operation.

Security posture

The website exhibits a good security posture with HTTPS enforced using TLS 1.3 and 1.2, no known SSL vulnerabilities, and a DMARC policy set to quarantine to protect email integrity. However, the absence of HSTS, Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, and X-Content-Type-Options headers represents a gap in best practices that could expose the site to certain web-based attacks. OCSP stapling is not enabled, which could impact certificate revocation checks. No vulnerabilities or exposed sensitive data were detected. Incident response and security policy pages are not publicly available, which could be improved to enhance transparency. Overall, the security measures are solid but could be strengthened with additional HTTP headers and improved SSL configurations.

Recommendations

  1. Enable HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) with includeSubDomains and preload directives to enforce HTTPS.
  2. Implement Content-Security-Policy (CSP) headers to mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks.
  3. Add X-Frame-Options and X-Content-Type-Options headers to prevent clickjacking and MIME sniffing.
  4. Enable OCSP stapling to improve SSL certificate revocation performance and security.
  5. Publish a dedicated security policy and incident response page to improve transparency and trust.
Technical notes

Notes

The website is built on a modern technology stack primarily using Webflow CMS, hosted on AWS infrastructure with Cloudfront CDN for content delivery. It integrates multiple third-party analytics and marketing tools such as Google Analytics, Segment, Hotjar, Clearbit, and Bing UET, indicating a mature digital marketing and data collection strategy. The site has a large page size and high resource count, resulting in a slow load time (~22.8 seconds), which could impact user experience and SEO. Mobile optimization and accessibility are good, with proper font loading and focus styles. SEO is well addressed with meta tags, Open Graph, and JSON-LD structured data. There is room for performance optimization to reduce load times and resource usage.
Standards and sources

Reference chips under each finding point to the standard, regulation or specification the finding relates to. They are taken from the official datasets below and mapped conservatively: a finding with no defensible link shows none. NIS2 and GDPR references mark where a finding is relevant evidence, not a compliance verdict. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2690 binds digital infrastructure and digital service providers; for other entities it is the most detailed public reading of the Article 21 measures. WCAG, EN 301 549, European Accessibility Act and Web Accessibility Directive references name the requirement an automated accessibility rule relates to; they are not a conformance verdict.

Retrieved 2026-10-25

Earlier scans of this domain

  1. 75/100 +4Medium28 findingsView report
  2. 71/100Medium31 findingsView report
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