WordPress managed hosting provider WP Engine has announced that it will end support for the .htaccess directive. WP Engine has initiated an End-of-Life (EOL) process to reduce the use of .htaccess on its servers and has set a date of October 2022 for the complete removal of support.
The use of .htaccess as a tool for managing websites is so ingrained that the idea of deprecating .htaccess sounds like a deal breaker. Some people may rightly think that if the client can’t have a custom .htaccess, then the web hosting service may not be suitable for the way modern websites are created.
But a closer look at what WP Engine is doing shows that this decision makes sense, and what is even more surprising is that this may become a common feature of high-performance web hosting in the future.
Why WP Engine deprecated .htaccess support
The reason WP Engine ditched .htaccess was to gain performance gains by removing .htaccess from the site level, and also to be able to take advantage of the performance gains that new technology brings.
The announcement stated:
“WP Engine is deprecating .htaccess files to improve site performance and adapt to industry trends.
If your site uses custom .htaccess directives outside of the default WordPress rules, we’ve put together a list of recommended alternatives. “
WP Engine does not estimate that this change will affect most of the websites it currently hosts, as most only use the default version of .htaccess that WordPress generates.
“Based on our analysis, most WP Engine sites don’t need any additional changes to .htaccess as they are using the default WordPress version of that file.
Default WordPress rewriting will be handled automatically by WP Engine at the server level. “
.htaccess and site performance
.htaccess is a way to control certain aspects of a website, such as redirecting requests to one URL to another, redirecting requests to insecure HTTP URLs to secure HTTP, and blocking malicious hackers and crawlers IP address, and many other uses.
.htaccess is a file used on servers running Apache open source server software (for example, an Nginx server running as a reverse proxy for Apache).
Using .htaccess files is a long-established and well-established practice for managing websites.
However, something that may not be generally considered or discussed is that using .htaccess files is not an efficient way to manage activities such as blocking IP addresses or redirecting URLs.
When .htaccess files become very large, they can negatively impact SEO and conversion-related metrics, such as time to first byte (TTFB), which measures the time it takes for a server to start downloading a web page resource.
according to a Tested by StrategiQ After quantifying the performance impact of .htaccess, they found that .htaccess files have an impact on server performance and scalability.
They found that large .htaccess files had a measurably significant impact on CPU usage. Testing also showed that a 1,000-line .htaccess file could have a “significant” impact on server memory usage.
They point out that the extra stress is not enough to crash the site, as the server still has enough resources to handle the stress.
“It’s worth noting that in our tests, we didn’t see any huge impact on overall page load times beyond 50,000 line files. This is probably because, even when processing requests using a lot of resources, we still didn’t peak capacity.”
However, it is conceivable that if you have multiple websites with large .htaccess files on a single server, there may be an impact on the server.
Second, many may be surprised that, according to the official Apache Software Foundation (developers of Apache server software running .htaccess), the only time an .htaccess file should be used is when access to the server is restricted by configuration files, such as when budgeting may be found on shared servers.
Apache Software Foundation Documentation Suggest:
“For example, there is a common misconception that user authentication should always happen in the .htaccess file, and another misconception in recent years is that the mod_rewrite directive must happen in the .htaccess file.
This is not the case at all.
You can put the user authentication configuration in the master server configuration, which is actually the preferred way. Also, the mod_rewrite directive works better in a master server configuration in many ways. “
According to the Apache documentation, what WP Engine proposes is actually a best practice that will benefit their user base in the short and long term by creating an environment that can make their website run faster for sales, ad clicks and has small SEO benefits.
Will WP Engine users feel inconvenienced?
WP Engine provides a way to use .htaccess files by using what they call network rules. Web Rules allow users to manage IP-based allow/deny rules and set header responses.
Redirection can be applied in three ways Inside the WP Engine managed hosting platform:
- Batch import Nginx configuration for WP Engine
- Bulk import a WordPress plugin called Redirection
- Bulk Import Yoast SEO Plugin Redirect Manager
I use the Redirection WordPress plugin on some of my sites and find it an easy way to manage redirects and headers.
The plugin also has a handy log file showing that your visit resulted in a 404 response, which can alert you to misspelled inbound links (which can be fixed by creating a redirect to the correct URL for the misspelled URL).
WP Engine End of Life (EOL) Process for .htaccess
While ending support for .htaccess may seem like a radical idea at first, the approach taken by WP Engine makes sense given how the Apache Software Foundation itself recommends against using .htaccess at the site level.
There are clear benefits for their users and website visitors alike.
Will other web hosts follow their lead?
Citation
Read the WP Engine announcement
.htaccess deprecations and alternatives
