Keeping on top of htaccess
I use htaccess regularly to redirect old urls to new and for removing pages that don’t exist etc. So much so that the htaccess file for Shareworld had grown to over 100kb! Part of this size was due to a past re-design where almost all of our pages had to be redirected.
I was once advised that these redirects should really be kept forever. However, I was fed up with the size of the htaccess file – considering this has to be accessed every time a page is loaded, thats quite a demand on the server.
So, I decided to check all the pages listed for Shareworld using “site:www.shareworld.co.uk” and found that a lot of the old pages I had redirected with htaccess (301) were no longer showing up in the list of pages indexed by Google – so I thought it would be safe to delete the redirects in question.
I have now managed to reduce my htaccess file from 100k down to 20k! Lets see if that makes any difference…