Category: WordPress Tips

There is a misconception about the .htacces file and its usefulness in a Windows hosting environment.  Normally, this is the file that controls the configuration settings for Linux/UNIX/Apache hosting environments, and its Window’s equivalent is the web.config file.  I finally found a use for it the other day, and it’s with WordPress itself.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to blog about it when I found the fix, and it seems that I am unable to reproduce the problem.  But I wanted to at least write about the events that led up to the problem and what I did to fix it to hopefully help reduce the frustration for someone else encountering the same issue.  This site is about troubleshooting computer problems after all.  And who knows?  That someone might be me again after a few months as it’s getting harder to remember things as I age.

The problem was created when I tried to transfer WordPress from one Windows hosting provider to another.  Of course, I know each hosting provider is configured differently, and I was running into errors during the move.  I finally isolated it to a problem with URL Rewrite.  Apparently, the other hosting provider disabled delegation for URL Rewrite, so it broke a lot of my WordPress links.  After scouring the Internet, I found the solution, and WordPress will actually tell you the solution.  You just need to click on Settings and Permalinks.  WordPress will throw some PHP errors, but I never noticed that way at the bottom, it tells you that you need to include some code in the .htaccess file.  Basically, it’s to include the mod_rewrite (Linux/UNIX/Apache’s equivalent for IIS’ URL Rewrite) rules.  Normally, WordPress will look at the web.config file for rewrite rules in a WIndows environment, but since the hosting provider disabled delegation for it, IIS would error out.  This means I couldn’t use them.  But once I created an .htaccess file with the mod_rewrite rules and uploaded it, my links started working again.  It’s good to know that WordPress will look at the .htaccess file for configuration information if it cannot find it in the web.config file.  And I believe here’s the code that you need to add to the .htaccess file to get everything working again:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

In my previous article, I gave my two cents on where you should add the Google Analytics code in WordPress. After fiddling around trying to optimize another site of mine’s, I discovered that this will probably do little to help improve page speed. It does delay the parsing of JavaScript since the client browser reads the HTTP GET request line by line, and it’s at the end, but the effect is probably minimal. I did discover that I could use the script defer attribute to delay the processing, and it had a greater impact. Even though the HTML5 specifications indicate that it should not be used without the src attribute, I tried it, and it appeared to have a greater effect, at least in Chrome. (I know that it may not work with all browsers because each browser will implement it differently.) I can at least say it did solve some problem with my webpages rendering correctly after I redesigned them using Responsive Design, so you might want to consider giving it a try.

There are already enough blogs out there with tutorials on how you can add Google Analytics to your WordPress site.  I won’t bother repeating that information here, but I wanted to add my 2 cents to the discussion.  If you plan to add the tracking code manually, Google actually instructs you to place it right before the HTML header closing tag (i.e. </head>), but I recommend you place it right before the HTML body closing tag (i.e </body>).  Why?  Because while hand coding another website and using Google’s own PageSpeed tool which provides optimization recommendations, it says I should defer the parsing of JavaScript in order to improve performance (i.e load time).  And that’s really easy to do if you’re using one of the default themes.  Just go to Appearance -> Editor and click on the Footer link (i.e. footer.php) on your right.  Scroll all the way to the bottom and place the Google Analytics tracking code right in between the <?php wp_footer(); ?> and </body> tags.  Then click on the Update File button.