Remove www in url
For SEO reasons, you might always remove (or use) the www prefix in your urls. The following snippet will remove the www from your website url and redirect any url with the www to the non-www version.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^your-site.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://your-site.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Prevent hotlinking
Hotlinking is a bad practice that consist of using the images from another site on yours. When you’re hotlinked by someone else, your bandwidth is used for someone else profit. Of course, you may want to prevent hotlinkers. Just add the following snippet to your .htaccess file after replacing the example urls by your own urls.
RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]
Redirect all WordPress feeds to feedburner
Most bloggers are using Feedburner, a web service that lets you know how many people are reading your blog via feeds. If you’re using WordPress, you should redirect all WordPress feeds (rss, atom, etc) to your feedburner feed. Modify lines 2 and 3, and then paste this code to your .htaccess file.
<IfModule mod_alias.c> RedirectMatch 301 /feed/(atom|rdf|rss|rss2)/?$ http://feedburner.com/yourfeed/ RedirectMatch 301 /comments/feed/(atom|rdf|rss|rss2)/?$ http://feedburner.com/yourfeed/ </IfModule>
Create custom error pages
Tired of the old errors pages of your site? Just create some html files with the look you want, upload them to your server, and add the following to your .htaccess file:
ErrorDocument 400 /errors/badrequest.html ErrorDocument 401 /errors/authreqd.html ErrorDocument 403 /errors/forbid.html ErrorDocument 404 /errors/notfound.html ErrorDocument 500 /errors/serverr.html
Remove file extensions from urls
File extensions may be useful to developers, but there’s absolutely no need for your site visitors to be able to see them. This snippet will remove the .html extension on any html files. Of course, this code can be easily adapted to remove extensions from other file extensions such as php.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
# Replace html with your file extension, eg: php, htm, asp
Reduce pages weight by compressing static data
Do you know that it is possible to send compressed data to the visitors, which will be decompressed by the client? This code will definitely save you (and your visitor) bandwidth and reduce your pages weight.
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Automatically add utf-8 charset to files
In order to avoid encoding problems, you can force a specific encoding directly on your .htaccess file. That way, you’ll ensure that your html documents will always render correctly, even if your forget to add a <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"> directive on your html pages.
<FilesMatch "\.(htm|html|css|js)$"> AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 </FilesMatch>