This production-grade .htaccess file provides a complete WordPress .htaccess optimization solution, designed to be a safe and effective way to improve performance, security, and technical SEO.

• 🔐 Advanced Security: Implements modern security headers and rules based on WordPress .htaccess security best practices to protect your site from common vulnerabilities.
• ⚡ Intelligent Caching: Uses mod_expires and Cache-Control with immutable directives to create a powerful browser caching policy. This is a key step to fix .htaccess caching WordPress issues and dramatically improve site speed.
• 🗜️ Efficient Compression: Enables GZIP compression for all text-based assets, with an optional (commented-out) block for Brotli for even better performance.
• 📈 SEO-Ready: Includes several WordPress htaccess SEO tweaks that contribute to better Core Web Vitals and search engine rankings.
• 🌐 CDN & Hosting Friendly: Works on Apache, LiteSpeed, and popular hosting platforms. It disables ETag to work seamlessly with CDNs.

A well-configured .htaccess file is a cornerstone of technical SEO. Search engines like Google prioritize websites that are fast, secure, and provide a good user experience. Here’s how this configuration helps:

• Site Speed: Faster loading times are a critical ranking factor. By enabling browser caching and GZIP/Brotli compression, this .htaccess reduces server response times and the size of your pages, directly improving your PageSpeed Insights score.
• Security: A secure website is a trustworthy website. The security headers and rules in this file help protect your site from common threats, which prevents it from being flagged as unsafe by search engines and protects your SEO rankings from being damaged by a hack.
• User Experience: By preventing mixed-content warnings (via upgrade-insecure-requests) and ensuring resources load quickly, this configuration contributes to a smoother experience for your visitors, reducing bounce rates and encouraging longer session durations—both positive signals for SEO.

Proper WordPress .htaccess optimization is a powerful way to enhance your site's technical foundation for better search engine visibility.

1. Backup your current .htaccess file.
2. Replace the contents with the file from this repository.
3. Customize (Optional):
   • Hotlink Protection: To prevent other sites from embedding your images, uncomment the Hotlink Protection block and replace yourdomain\.com with your actual domain.
   • XML-RPC: If you do not use services that require it (like the Jetpack plugin or the WordPress mobile app), keep the xmlrpc.php block enabled. Otherwise, comment it out.
   • Brotli Compression: If your server supports mod_brotli, you can get better compression by commenting out the mod_deflate (GZIP) section and uncommenting the mod_brotli section.
4. Validate your site using tools like Security Headers and Google PageSpeed Insights to see the improvements.

• Servers: Apache 2.4+, LiteSpeed, Plesk (Apache+NGINX), Cloudways stacks.
• Modules: mod_rewrite, mod_headers, mod_deflate, mod_alias, mod_expires.

When using Cloudflare or similar CDNs, prefer managing headers centrally there; this .htaccess acts as a robust fallback.

• Use Conventional Commits (e.g., feat:, fix:, docs:).
• Test on staging before production.
• Tag releases (e.g., v1.0.3) with clear change logs.

See the CHANGELOG.md for full details.

• MDN HTTP Headers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers
• OWASP Hardening Guides: https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/
• Sucuri WordPress Security: https://sucuri.net/guides/wordpress-security/
• WPBeginner Bot Blocking: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-block-bad-bots-in-wordpress-using-htaccess/