Speed Up the Rewrite Engine for WordPress

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While reading Michael Gray’s post on WordPress’ scalability, I followed this link to a webmasterworld.com forum on WordPress’ default .htaccess code. jdMorgan replied to thread with a whole new set of code to replace the .htaccess file that WordPress installs to optimize the URLs in a blog. jdMorgan had rewritten the .htaccess code in order to,

…fix several performance-affecting problems. Notably, the unnecessary and potentially-problematic <IfModule> container is completely removed, and code is added and re-structured to both prevent completely-unnecessary file- and directory- exists checks and to reduce the number of necessary -exists checks to one-half the original count (due to the way mod_rewrite behaves recursively in .htaccess context).

Without further ado, here is jdMorgan’s new code to completely replace what WordPress automatically installs:

# BEGIN WordPress
#
RewriteEngine on
#
# Unless you have set a different RewriteBase preceding this point,
# you may delete or comment-out the following RewriteBase directive
# RewriteBase /
#
# if this request is for “/” or has already been rewritten to WP
RewriteCond $1 ^(index\.php)?$ [OR]
# or if request is for image, css, or js file
RewriteCond $1 \.(gif|jpg|ico|css|js)$ [NC,OR]
# or if URL resolves to existing file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
# or if URL resolves to existing directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
# then skip the rewrite to WP
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [S=1]
# else rewrite the request to WP
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
#
# END wordpress

Our Unofficial Results

I’ve been a bit concerned with how quickly a couple of our WordPress installs have been loading, so I was anxious to give this a try. I did some testing on two sites as they are now. Most of the pages were taking about three seconds to load (yes, I took the cache out of the equation). I installed the new code and tried again (cache still turned off) and the pages were installing in somewhere around two seconds. About a 50% increase in load speeds. This is all, of course, very unscientific, but that much of a change was enough for me to write this post.

Of course, your milage may vary! It might even crash your website for all I know?I’m certainly not guaranteeing jdMorgan’s code. All I know is that it seems to have sped up a couple of our WordPress-powered blogs.

How to Change the .htaccess File

I hope you have as much luck with this as we did.

Speed is Officially a Factor in Google Rankings

It was recently announced that one of the new factors Google takes into consideration for ranking a website is how quickly the pages load. With this in mind, these types of tweaks can have more impact than just making your readers a bit happier. Take a look at our complete guide to speeding up a website for an expanding list of tips to optimize your load time.