7 Easy .htaccess Tricks for Improving Website Performance
An .htaccess file lets you configure and customize your web server settings, even if you don’t own the whole server. With .htaccess files, you can make configuration changes on a per-directory basis (just stick the .htaccess file in a certain directory, and the configuration directives will apply to the entire directory and all of its subdirectories). Below are seven easy .htaccess tricks you can use to improve your website’s performance.
#1: Prevent Hotlinking
Hotlinking refers to using a link to an image from another website instead of saving the image on your own site. It’s a common practice that can really eat up your website’s bandwidth. The code below will redirect all hotlinked images to a specific image (defined on line 6).
RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your “don’t hotlink” image url
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]
#2: File Caching
File caching is one of the most effective ways to speed up your website because it eliminates unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. This code snippet will set your site up with .htaccess file caching.
# 1 YEAR
<FilesMatch “\.(ico|pdf|flv)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=29030400, public”
</FilesMatch>
# 1 WEEK
<FilesMatch “\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=604800, public”
</FilesMatch>
# 2 DAYS
<FilesMatch “\.(xml|txt|css|js)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=172800, proxy-revalidate”
</FilesMatch>
# 1 MIN
<FilesMatch “\.(html|htm|php)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=60, private, proxy-revalidate”
</FilesMatch>
#3: Expires Headers
For visitors who come back to your site often, you can use this .htaccess snippet to tell their browsers to keep the static content stored locally for a certain period of time and reuse it. This reduces the number of HTTP requests that are made, which conserves bandwidth.
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType text/html “access plus 1 days”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 2 weeks”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 2 weeks”
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 2 weeks”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 2 weeks”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access plus 1 years”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 2 weeks”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 2 weeks”
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access plus 2 weeks”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access plus 2 weeks”
</IfModule>
#4: Compression with gzip
Mod_gzip is a handy external extension module for Apache web servers that helps reduce the size of web pages served over HTTP. If you already have mod_gzip installed on your server, you need to add the following in an .htaccess file for your hosting account.
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_static_suffix .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gzip
mod_gzip_on YES
mod_gzip_handle_methods GET
mod_gzip_temp_dir /tmp
mod_gzip_can_negotiate Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_send_vary On
mod_gzip_update_static No
mod_gzip_keep_workfiles No
mod_gzip_minimum_file_size 250
mod_gzip_maximum_file_size 1048576
mod_gzip_maximum_inmem_size 60000
mod_gzip_min_http 1000
mod_gzip_item_exclude reqheader “User-agent: Mozilla/4.0[678]“
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/pdf$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^image/
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript$
mod_gzip_item_include file .js$
mod_gzip_item_include file .css$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include file .html$
mod_gzip_item_include file .pl$
mod_gzip_item_include file .cgi$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^httpd/unix-directory$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/postscript$
</IfModule>
#5: Data Compression
This code will compress data on your web server, which decreases response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response.
# data compression
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/javascript text/css application/javascript
#6: Preserve Bandwidth
This code will help you preserve bandwidth by enabling PHP’s built in transparent zlib compression. This can cut your bandwidth usage in half!
# preserve bandwidth
<ifmodule mod_php4.c>
php_value zlib.output_compression 16386
</ifmodule>
#7: Disable Entity Tags (etags)
Etags provide a way for validating entities that is more flexible than the last-modified date. The problem is that etags are usually are created in a way that makes them unique to a specific server hosting a site. This means the etags won’t match when a browser gets the original component from one server and later tries to validate that component on a different server. You can avoid this site-slowing scenario by disabling your etags with the code below.
# disable etags
FileETag none
Category: Website Tips
