BrightonSEO

This talk will share advanced use cases of the infamous .htaccess file, for and beyond SEO, in a very practical way.

29% of websites today use Apache webservers. Apache's infamous .htaccess file is quite popular with both SEOs and developers. The use cases for SEO are numerous, including URL redirects, pattern redirects, web performance optimization (such as compression and caching), setting HTTP headers (eg. canonicals, noindex), etc.

Jan noticed over the years that .htaccess files are often used incorrectly or inefficiently. Even worse, some IT teams have a lack of knowledge about what .htaccess can (and can't) do. As a result, sometimes developers needlessly build complex solutions elsewhere in the codebase. This is significant for technical SEO, because the priority of a dev ticket is influenced by its estimated workload. Tickets with high workload (story points) are often placed later ("the next sprint") in the planning. Or, in extreme cases, never planned at all. The aim of this talk is to prevent this from happening.

Aimed at technical SEOs and/or developers who have a basic understanding of web development.