None tech savvy ready, pause, and heed my warning!
Sorry for the dramatics but really, read and heed my warning and solutions below before you go ahead and make any edits in the backend. I don’t want anyone freaking out on me if you accidentally screw up and think your website is broken. .htaccess file controls your server so typos or mistakes can at best just not work or at worst stop your website from loading!
#1 ALWAYS make a backup before you start to play in backend files.
(copy / paste & save the original .htaccess text into a new backup notepad file)
#2 IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG… Don’t have a cow man.
If you encounter any problems Just copy and paste your original settings back into the .htaccess file & save
#3 Hay presto, you can unclench, your site will be restored as before and your journey of what you did wrong begins.
Speed Up Tip and Tricks
Step 1: Speed Test your site on Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMatrix for example to view your current score.
Step 2: Open up your .htaccess file. Now this file is located in the root directory of your website. This can be found by accessing your files via FTP or viewing your directory via C-Panel. This file is usually a “Hidden” file so be sure to tick the “Show Hidden Files” boxes upon entering your directory.
Step 3: Once you have your .htacess file open and ready to edit what we want to do is enable browser caching.
IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG… Don’t have a cow man.
If you encounter any problems Just copy and paste your original settings back into the .htaccess file & save
Hay presto, you can unclench, your site will be restored as before and your journey of what you did wrong begins.
/* Code Start Copy Below */
/* Code End Copy Above */
Step 4: Once you save the above to your file, save it and go back to your website, hit F5 or refresh and make sure it’s still functioning normally.
Step 5: You should consider Limiting the number of post revisions. By default, WordPress saves and stores every change you make to your web pages/posts in a revision. This is a very cool reason to use WordPress since it can save your bacon if you screw up when making news pages or editing existing ones, you can simply revert back, yaaay! However, all that saving and revision creation makes for a ton of old files that can weigh down your website causing it to be slow.
Locate your wp-config.php file in the root directory of the WordPress installation. Add this line of code to your file.
You could if you really wanted to, set WordPress to not store revisions at all. But I don’t really recommend this, a few revisions give you some peace of mind and a get-out of S*%T free card. so simply limiting the number of saves should suffice. If you are never going to change or update the website as it is (unlikely) or you super confident you’ll never need to revert back and want to streamline every minute speed aspect like a shaven swimmer greased up in speedos, then you can call your code out using this instead:
Step 6: Enable GZIP Compression via webserver configuration. Now just a side note, different web servers
have different instructions. Here is the most common way to enable compression via .htaccess
Copy and paste this code into your .htacess file, save and test if GZIP compression is active here.
If not then you will find links there also that explain the other methods.
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
Feels Kinda Good Modding Doesn’t It?
Step 6: Retest Test your sites speed on Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMatrix Did it help?
I would imagine these couple of basics will set many websites up a notch or two in ways of speed. You could, can, and WILL spend hours trying to speed up your website even more with other methods and secrets I’ll protect to the death like my druid spellbook! (Cough Cough) anyways, I hope this helped to speed up your WordPress website a little bit, I think you’ll find it was worth your 5 minutes of effort and without using any plugins! WHOOP!
Ok folks, that’s it for this weeks ‘How To”
If you have any questions comment in My Web design discussion Q&A and may the force be with you!
