#mod rewrite

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Quick Tips For Boosting Your Blog Load Speed

Minify & Combine Javascript/CSS

WP-Minify

This plugin integrates the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

How Does it Work?

WP Minify grabs JS/CSS files in your generated WordPress page and passes that list to the Minify engine. The Minify engine then returns a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify to reference in the WordPress header.

Use a Content Delivery Network

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network. Basically, it’s a bunch of highly optimized servers all across the world, with a bit of unique logic worked into them: you’ll always hit the server that’s closest to you. This leads to huge performance improvements for sites that have visitors from all across the world, like this one.

My images were coming from the US, which was better for like 50% of my readers but pretty slow for a lot of my European readers (about 35% of my readers are European). Now, for them, these images can come from the CDNs servers closest to them, in a lot of cases, this CDN server would be in the same country as them. MaxCDN servers are literally all over the world.

The CDN works with so called Pull URL’s. This means you specify a directory on your server that it pulls all files from, which it then starts serving from the CDN. This allows for a few quite neat tricks, for starters, to serve all your uploaded files from the CDN quite easily, once you’ve done some WordPress stuff that I’ll of course take care of for you in the next section… 

Cache Your Site

Search engines consider site speed to be an important factor search rankings. This is why at iWebArticle we try our best to improve site load speed to an optimal level. Doing that, we have noticed that caching our website helped us improve site speed as well as balancing huge spikes in traffic.

Note: Both W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are great plugins. We highly recommend that you use one or the other depending on your needs. WP-Super-Cache just happens to work very well with our Genesis WordPress Theme.

First thing you need to do is install and activate WP Super Cache plugin. Upon activation, WP Super Cache will notify you that caching is not enabled on your website at the moment.

Setting up WP Super Cache – The Easy Way

To enable cache, go to Settings » WP Super Cache. Under the Easy tab, turn Caching on and hit update status button.

After turning on the cache, click on the test cache button to check if it is working. WP Super Cache will fetch your WordPress site twice and will compare the time stamps of both pages. If the both time stamps match then this means that caching is working on your site now.

WP Super Cache Advanced Set up

WP super cache is a powerful plugin, and it comes with many advance options. These options can further improve your site’s performance. To Set up WP Super Cache with advance options, go to Settings » WP Super Cache and click on Advanced tab.

Enable Caching

First check the box that says Cache hits to this website for quick access. Below that you will see three caching options. By default WP Super Cache uses PHP to serve cache files. However, using PHP to serve cache files can be resource incentive particularly on shared hosting environments. So we would like to recommend that you try using mod_rewrite to serve cache files. After that scroll down and hit the update status button to save these settings.

WP Super Cache will now show you a notification that mod_rewrite rules must be updated and possibly another notification about scheduling garbage collection. Scroll down the page, and you will see mod_rewrite rules that needs to be added. Click on Update Mod_Rewrite Rules button to update these rules. Once mod_rewrite rules are updated this section will turn green.

To resolve the notice about garbage collection, scroll down on the advance settings page to the Expiry Time & Garbage Collection section and set up a time and frequency for garbage collection of cached files on your server.

Enable Compression in WP Super Cache: Compression allows WP Super Cache to serve cached files as compressed files. These files are downloaded by user browsers quickly due to their smaller size. To enable compression, simply check the box that says Compress pages so they’re served more quickly to visitors.

Setting up CDN with WP Super Cache

To setup CDN with WP Super Cache, click on the CDN tab and check the box next to Enable CDN Support option. Enter your offsite URL, which will be the url of your pullzone. For example, http://cdn.iwebarticle.com

In the additional CNAMEs field enter other CNAMEs you have created for your pullzone. For example, http://cdn1.iwebarticle.com, http://cdn2.iwebarticle.com , http://cdn3.iwebarticle.com

Lastly, check the box that says Skip https URLs to avoid “mixed content” errors and save changes. Now your website is now ready to serve static content from a CDN.

Serve a Static Site with WP Super Cache

The preload mode in WP Super Cache allows you to create super cache static files for all your posts and pages and serve a static website. You may ask Why would anyone want to do that?

-To conserve server resources. - To serve an old site that is not being updated anymore. - To improve site speed by serving static content only.

These were just a few reasons but there could be many more reasons and situations where you might want to completely disable PHP processes. Don’t worry your WordPress will work normally, and you will still be able to manage your content with WordPress.

Refresh preload cache files options will be set to zero by default, minimum required time is at least 30 minutes. Pre-loading your entire WordPress site takes some time and consumes a lot of resources on your server. You can leave it to 0 if you do not want your static files to expire ever unless you manually refresh cache.

Detect for Errors

Use valid markup that contains no errors. Syntax errors can make your page difficult for search engines to index.

To find the detected errors, run the W3C validation service, or check Validator.nu to make sure you don’t miss an error.

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Getting your first hand on mod_rewrite

I had been getting a lot of questions lately about the mod_rewrite. And though there are a lot of tutorials out there to help you out, not many are easy to understand and not many teach the basics that one require. So I thought I would write a little article on how to use mod_rewrite the one module that has been a matter of thought for every new and a little experienced developers. Is it that difficult? We find out here.

So what actually is mod_rewrite? It is a module which provides a powerful way to do URL manipulations. It lets you do all kind of URL manipulations for your site that helps you build pretty URL or Search Engine friendly URLs. And it just does not limit to that. This thing is complex while you are a beginner but the basics that you would need can be addressed by referring to some tutorials and here is one. In other words: With mod_rewrite you either shoot yourself in the foot the first time and never use it again or love it for the rest of your life because of its power. 

To use mod_rewrite you first need it to be loaded on your server. You can check this by using phpinfo(). Assuming you have PHP installed, simply save <?php phpinfo(); ?> in a text file with .php extension and upload to your server. Run the script by pointing your browser to the address and search for “mod_rewrite”. You should find it under “Loaded Modules”. If  you are using Online server than you can ask your host to enable it if it is not done yet. Though in most cases it is enabled before hand.

Now that you have checked whether your server has mod_rewrite enabled, now we see how the structure looks like. Well it is saved in a simple file called ‘.htaccess’ . Yes the name is just .htaccess no name and no any other extensions and it is saved in the root folder of your  site eg: www or public_html . So all you have to do is open notepad write down a few line of codes and save it as .htaccess and upload to you root folder and you are done.

Some basic use of mod_rewrite are :

Preventing Hot Linking

Search Engine Friendly URLs /Pretty URL

Redirects

Prevent Hot Linking : This is used to prevent other websites from using your pictures on to their site by directly linking it to your site, this can use a lot of your bandwidth. So you can do this by simply writing a few line of code using mod_rewrite.

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !domain.com RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ nosteal.jpg [L]

All that the first line does is It starts the ReWrite Engine so we can do some magic  . Then we check if the http referrer is our site or not. If it is not then it transfers all requests made to files with .gif ,.jpg, .jpeg, and .png extension to ‘cheatingisbad.jpg’ . Don’t forget to change domain.com to your domain name.

Search Engine Friendly / Pretty URL : This might be a known term to you and many might be reading this article for this part. It is a known fact that search engines love a neat URL like http://domain.com/page/abc rather than http://domain.com/index.php?page=abc . The reason search engines love it is because they think any URL with ‘?’ sign is dynamic and it loads data dynamically so the page keeps changing, so to make believe search engines and also to make a easily remember able link mod_rewrite comes into action.

RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/$ page.php?name=$1

This converts http://domain.com/page.php?name=about_us to http://domain.com/about_us/

RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/$ page.php?name=$1

301 Redirects : There are some times when your  one page is ranking good on google or any other search engine and you do not want to loose all the traffic it gets but still you need to move your page from that location, what do you do? Loose traffic or take risk and stay at that location though it is not suitable? Well you keep the rankings too and change location also and all with the help of mod_rewrite. With this you can easily redirect a page that gets you traffic to a new page or location using a 301 permanent redirect. 

RewriteEngine ON RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This piece of code transfers any of your request made to old domains like http://olddomain.com/abc.html will be redirected to http://newdomain.com/abc.html

Ban IP Addresses :

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} 123.45.67.89 RewriteRule .* you-are-banned.html [R]