There’s a lot that you can do with an htaccess file, and of course, things can get pretty advanced in a hurry. Here, we’re going to keep things pretty simple. These are the 10 basic htaccess hacks that every webmaster should know.
1. Force Caching with htaccess
Use: The following htaccess code won’t help the initial pageload, but it will significantly help subsequent pageloads by sending 304 status when requested elements haven’t been modified.
FileETag MTime Size ExpiresActive on ExpiresDefault "access plus x seconds"
I generally set the cache for one day (86400 seconds). You can also set different expirations for each file type by breaking each file type up into separate ExpiresByType lines such as:
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus x seconds" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus x seconds"
Simple!
2. Set a Custom 404 Page with htaccess
Use: I think this one is self explantatory. Just change ‘/notfound.html’ to match the path to your custom 404 page.
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html
3. Implement a 301 Redirect with htaccess
Use: If you have permanently changed the URL structure on your site (via either optimization change or CMS migration), you will want to implement 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL.
The syntax for a basic 301 redirect is:
Redirect 301 relative/path/to/oldurl/ http://www.domain.com/newurl/
The first URL should be a relative path to the old URL and the second one should be an absolute path to the new URL.
4. Only allow specific IP addresses in certain directories
This is especially useful for admin directories. I generally set my home IP and work IP as the only allowable IPs who can even attempt a login. Unlike other .htaccess hacks, this one doesn’t work from the root folder. You will need to create a new .htaccess file, put the following code in it, and upload it to your admin directory (that’s wp-admin if you’re using WordPress).
order deny, allow deny from all allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
To allow a second IP, just add another ‘allow from’ line.
5. Prevent Image Hot Linking with htaccess
Removed. Here is a MUCH better way to go about this thanks to Maurizio Petrone
6. Enable gzip with htaccess
Gzip is a means of compressing the files on your server so they will load faster. To enable gzip, just
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
7. Remove ‘category’ from a URL with htaccess
Many content management sytems use the ‘category’ URL segment. For instance:
http://makeitrank.com/category/category-name
Well, that’s fine, and it’s necessary to make the CMS work the way it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t need to be visible to do its job in some cases. Just drop the following code into your htaccess file to get rid of it.
RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
8. Define any page as the home page with htaccess
You can set any page as the homepage by adding the following to the htaccess file in your root directory.
DirectoryIndex myfile
9. Disable Directory Browsing
You want to keep people out of any directories that might reveal security weaknesses — for instance, plugin directories.
You can block vistors from browsing the directories by adding the following line to the htaccess file in the directory you’d like to block:
Options All -Indexes
10. Protect your htaccess file
Lastly, you want to protect your htaccess file. Hopefully your host has protected it for you, but you can’t be too safe with these things. The following hack will prevent anybody from accessing your htaccess:
<Files .htaccess> order allow,deny deny from all </Files>
Are there any useful htaccess hacks I’ve left out? Let me know!
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Nice list! Thanks for putting it together!
A very informative list, I would have liked to have read something like this years ago!!
Great! Nr. 10 was really new for me. More suggestions for Nr. 3 you can found under the URLWebsite.
regards
Loewenherz
Nice and simple explanation of quite usefull uses of htaccess. Many htaccess guides get quite complicated very quickly as mentioned in the beginning.
Very helpful hints. Much appreciated, thanks.
would be great to see some more of these
Hey thanks – I didn’t even know you could set Expire headers via .htaccess.
Just implemented this in our website!
Good explanation on .htaccess. Very useful one.
These are neither hacks, or really related to SEO at all…
These are great!
One question about number 6. All the files should be gzip-ed before doing that? or this will do it for you?
Thanks for the great tips. I will most definitely be using some of these.
Usefull tips, thanks.
Have a good day
A great list there, some we use every day and others we have to look up every time we actually want to use them
Thanks a ton!
Some useful ideas, a few of which I didn’t know about – but this guide is not much use. The lack of/inconsistent formatting of the code makes it difficult to work out what should be used and what is optional.
Also some things such as #1 really should have example code, instead of “access plus x seconds” – I have no idea what I would replace this with for a real situation.
There is no indication of where in the .htaccess these rules should go to work properly and not conflict with other rules.
Finally, wouldn’t #10 used as is block access to the entire site?
Awesome tips. The tip on disabling directory browsing is especially useful, since even Google can (and will) index directories you do NOT want indexed: WordPress plugin dirs for instance.
Great list, thanks. Perhaps you might want to include how to redirect all pages to a certain page, except for certain IP addresses (i.e. taking your site down for maintenance and redirecting users to one page, but allowing yourself to view all files).
@Ryan — My philosophy is that every element of a site is related to SEO, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with linkbuilding or traditional SEO practices. I understand what you mean, though.
@Johnny Ace & Brent — Good ideas. Maybe I’ll write a follow-up post and include those. Both are great ideas.
@Miles You’re absolutely right on the formatting & usability concerns. I’ll improve that.
As for #10, WordPress formatted things a little wonky on me, and tried to render the opening brackets around the files .htaccess as HTML tags. My fault, I didn’t proofread carefully enough. It’s fixed now.
thanks for useful info. I was founding it. I will use it now.
Brilliant post Kevin! This is certainly an area of SEO that doesn’t really get written more often, which most will really believe essential to all websites. I know most of the hacks that you have listed, but I never have thought of compiling them and sharing them to my readers. I must say this is a great find that is worth sharing.
Thanks, Jason! I’m glad you found it useful.
Thanks Kevin, I’ve referred to this article several times when setting up .htaccess on our company’s websites.
Great list,
The CMS category removal is especially useful as inherited CMS is clunky.
Thanks