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Here are some ways to Enhance WordPress Performance With Htaccess
Once you have your WordPress website up and running, its performance will be a major concern. A slow-loading website repels the users while one that fasts loader is preferred by them. While you can speed up your website with code improvement, database optimization is another solution that can help. Besides these methods, you can also boost WordPress performance with .htaccess. Want to know how you can do it? Here are some tips that you can implement on your server for processing requests faster.
Enable Gzip compression
Obviously, the loading time of your website will decrease when you compress your resources. Essentially, file compression involves making the files smaller so that they become faster to download. If your site uses the caching plugin, the compression code is probably added to your server by default. This means that the server would already be providing zipped assets. Alternatively, you will have to add some lines of code to the .htaccess file on the server in case you are not using a caching plugin.
Enable Keep-Alive
Another effective .htaccess trick for giving your WordPress website a performance boost is by enabling Keep-Alive. This tact makes the server and web browser capable of downloading resources on a single connection. Hence, it is easy to increase the loading speed using this method. All you need to do is just add ‘Connection: Keep-Alive’ HTTP header in the server and you are good to go.
Leverage Browser Caching
Developers recommend enabling Browser Caching via .htaccess as a method of speeding up WordPress websites. By enabling this feature, you empower your website to store resources such as JS or CSS files for a specific period. They need not download the resources time and again when the user accesses the site later. Consequently, the WordPress site is able to load faster and deliver better user experience as well.
Disable image hotlinking
The best part about WordPress is the flexibility that it offers. While developers can force www and https for greater security, they can also use varied methods to boost performance. One of these is by disabling image hotlinking. There is always a probability of spammers making use of image links from your website to their websites. Whenever someone accesses that web page, the image will get loaded from your server via image hotlinking. Obviously, it puts a load on your server and slows down its performance. Disabling this feature definitely helps you deal with such issues.
Enable page mod_pagespeed
Another reliable .htaccess trick for increasing WordPress performance and optimizing the website is by enabling the mod_pagespeed module. Developed by Google, this module is specifically meant to increase the page speed of websites. Several hosting providers support it by default though you may have to get it installed if your provider does not.
These useful .htaccess tips can be of great help when it comes to giving your WordPress site a performance boost. This is something that you should not compromise with because performance ultimately has an impact on the user experience that your site offers.
