Category: htaccess

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Leverage Browser Caching with .htaccess

Leverage Browser Caching with .htaccess

If you’re an SEO marketeer or a developer – you will see this a lot.

From Google Page Insights, Pingdom, SEM Rush, GTMetrix and other page speed tools – “Leverage Browser Caching” is bound to come up. If you’re ignoring this, then you’re business, your client, or site is at a major loss. Page speed is a huge variable when a customer first engages with your site – chances are high rate of drop offs will occur if you don’t leverage browser caching.
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An intro to GZIP and compression

An intro to GZIP and compression

GZIP is one of those big words used in programming to generally describe compression. Then again, you end up asking what “compression” is in the context of programming and computers. These two terms can be a little intimidating to the noob and not until you’ve really implemented it, or experienced it first hand you won’t really know it’s true nature and the fundamental idea behind it. So let’s do that.

We often see these two terms come up frequently during page speed optimizations. Software tools like GTMetrix and Page Speed Insights. If you’re running into page speed issues or a really slow loading page, these tools will recommend compressing your files. Alright so what does that mean?

Alright, a lot actually. But in simple terms:

Compression is the process of encoding information using fewer bits. — Ilya Grigorik, Google

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WPEngine, Nginx and htaccess

WPEngine, Nginx and htaccess

Redirects can get hairy sometimes – sometimes you get a nice clean canvas of directives, sometimes it’s messy and undocumented. Whatever the case, you’re dealing with an .htaccess file. One wrong move and you can crash your site
or worse yet a clients site. So before anything else make sure you have FTP access and you create a back up of their existing .htaccess file. Don’t even be tempted to do it through Yoast – even though they allow you to edit the .htaccess file right through WordPress. I’ve seen it happen and it isn’t worth it.

So you’ve got the .htaccess file – you’re going down line by line. It can look like a jungle at times – you’ll see caching stuff, some 301 redirects, some permission stuff.

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