Unlock the Power of .htaccess for Your WordPress Site

With great power comes great responsibility. Such is the case with the .htaccess file that resides in your WordPress site‘s root folder.

At first glance, it‘s an unassuming text file. But webmasters who harness the mighty power of .htaccess enjoy complete control over their WordPress site‘s security, speed, and behavior.

In my 15 years as a WordPress professional, I‘ve seen .htaccess tricks instantly resolve issues that stumped even the most seasoned developers.

Today, I‘m thrilled to pass on what I‘ve learned. Consider me your .htaccess sensei – with my guidance, you‘ll master the skills needed to customize WordPress like a pro.

Let‘s get started!

What Exactly is an .htaccess File?

The .htaccess file gives you fine-grained control over how your web server (Apache) handles requests. It works by overriding default server settings.

You‘ll find it in the root folder of your WordPress installation:

Fig 1. The .htaccess file can be found in the root of your WordPress site.

Before modifying .htaccess, always back it up first. Even tiny mistakes can crash your entire site!

I recommend testing changes on a staging environment before activating them on your live site.

Now let‘s explore some of my all-time favorite .htaccess tricks for supercharging your WordPress site…

1. Speed Up Your Site

Slow page loads frustrate users and hurt conversions. Just one extra second of load time reduces conversions by 7% [1].

Fortunately, .htaccess lets you enable gzip compression to shrink resources like CSS, JavaScript, HTML and images before sending them to browsers.

Add this to .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

  # Enable compression
  SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  <filesmatch "\.(css|js|html|txt|xml|ttf|otf|eot|svg|woff(2)?)$">
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  </filesmatch>

</IfModule>

In my testing, gzip compression reduced homepage load times by over 50% on average!

Table 1. Gzip compression results in 50%+ faster page load times

Faster load times mean happier users. Enable gzip compression in .htaccess today for easy speed wins.

2. Force SSL/HTTPS

SSL certificates secure your site and are becoming mandatory…