Tag: htaccess

Permanently Redirect all URL’s to Lowercase

Ideally I like to keep all urls in lowercase, but there are a few things that can lead to your site being indexed with a mixture of upper and lower case characters, which in turn can lead to problems with search engines.

How can this happen? Well, for me it was playing around with Joomla’s sh404sef component and not checking the settings properly. By default it is set to use the case of category and article titles which resulted in some ugly /Joomla/Page-Title type urls. Whilst the component was installed it wasn’t a problem. After removing it (for many reasons) the problems started. When requesting the above url Joomla will serve the page /joomla/page-title and the url in the browser will remain as /Joomla/Page-Title.

If applications do this by default then it only takes a rival company to point several mixed-case links to your site to potentially cause a lot of problems.

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Joomla Stalling at Installation Stage | PHP Session Storage

There has been a few reports about not being able to install Joomla because it stalls at the installation and you can’t get past the first installer step.

Whilst there are many reasons why this could happen, most times I have come accross it it has been down to the server setup and Joomla not having access to the PHP sessions directory.

If it can’t save a session then you will never get past the first step. So lets configure a session direcory we can write to without having to contact our host, who will most likely blame somebody or something else whilst they scramble behind the scenes (hopefully).

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Set Expires Headers in .htaccess

Set Expires Headers in .htaccess to speed up page load times

If you use the firebug pagespeed addon or yslow you will be used to seeing the warning ‘Add Expires Headers’

This can be quite simple to fix by adding the following lines at the bottom of your .htaccess file.

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Speed up @fontface loading time

@fontface is a great tool for giving your site an individual look, the down-side is that on a standard site, the font is downloaded on each page view.

As the font can take a little time to download, the page text is loaded first and then the font is replaced once it has finished downloading which (especially on slow connections) leads to a flash of unformatted text (sometimes described as FOUT flash of unformatted text).

There are a few tutorials which explain how to stop the text displaying until the font has finished downloading, but I feel this is against the readers interests as ultimatley they are there to read the text, however it looks.

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301 Redirect Each Page of Site to New Domain Address

To redirect all pages from http://www.olddomain.com to http://www.newdomain.com in the domain root of your old domain create a .htaccess file and paste the following code, changing the domain name:

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Compress Favicon with Htaccess

Add MIME type and Expires Header to Favicon

Add these lines to your .htaccess file to speed up favicon loading, as specified by the Yahoo Yslow documentation.

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Gzip Content Through .htaccess for Suported Browsers | Joomla

Compress all files through .htaccess

Here’s a few more tips to speed up your joomla website through your .htaccess file.

Borrowed from the magento standard .htaccess, which contained some nice code to compress, or not compress depending on the user agent calling for the page.

The lines look like this, and can be added to the bottom of your file:

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