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10+ .htaccess snippets to optimize your website

Apache .htaccess file is at the heart of your web server and control how your website will react to different actions performed by your visitors. I’ve compiled 10+ awesome .htaccess snippets to optimize your website in many ways: Redirections, performances, ease of use… Enjoy!

All of the snippets below have to be pasted into your .htaccess file, which is located on the root of your Apache server.

** Warning: Always make sure you have a working backup before editing your .htaccess file! **

Force trailing slash

Many clients of mine asked me for always having a trailing slash at the end of their urls. Looks like it’s great for SEO. The following snippet will alwyas add a trailing slash to your site urls.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
 RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Source: http://perishablepress.com/code-snippets/

Prevent hotlinking

Hotlinking (the act of using images from another site than yours) is unfortunely a common practice which can waste lots of your precious bandwidth. This useful snippets will redirect all hotlinked images to a specific image, defined on line 6.

RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

Source: http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-protect-your…