Sep 21, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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This essential .htaccess rules article is a part of the blog optimization techniques I’ve implemented lately and taken the loading times of my blog from 12-18 seconds to 4-7 seconds. As a bonus, these .htaccess rules improved the blog security at the same time.
Here’s the thing. Many blogs have a .htaccess file that only has the rules WordPress (or any other blogging platform) install places there and possibly rules a plugin has created too. If you don’t add these rules to your root .htaccess file, you’re missing out easy performance improvements any blogger can have. So don’t count on your hosting provider’s default rules (if there even is any) and make your blog better with these simple .htaccess rules.
As a part of general optimizing a blog for both fast page loading and securing the site, the .htaccess -file at the root of your domain is an easy way to do web page optimization on a site level. Putting these rules into use won’t alone cut your page loading times to half, but they do provide the foundation for further optimization and speed improvements for your blog, or any website for that matter.
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Jul 14, 2009
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Antti Kokkonen
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I constantly re-evaluate the WordPress plugins I use to ensure that my blog is running smoothly and there are no resource-hogging plugins running. I covered this in my earlier post about plugins slowing down a blog.
So yes, I’m a plugin junkie and I love great WordPress plugins, but I’m more and less settled for the list of essential WordPress plugins I have now. But every now and then such a great plugin comes up that I just have to try and this time, it stick and I already added it to all my blogs..
Most of the best plugins in my mind have been created by Joost de Valk, who has created many great plugins, with over 1 million downloads in total. These plugins include such masterpieces like Google Analytics for WordPress and Sociable.
But this post isn’t about Joost’s plugins, but the SmushIt for WordPress -post he wrote to his blog at Yoast.com, a post about an automatic image optimization plugin called WP Smush.it, written by Alex Dunae. As mentioned, this plugin quickly made it to my list of essential plugins for WordPress, and I think you should install it too, if you use images on your blog (and you do, right?)
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