<\/span><\/h2>\nHot-linking is a form of bandwidth. It occurs when other websites serve your images directly from their URLs on your website, instead of uploading them to their own servers. In simple terms, they steal your web hosting bandwidth and you don\u2019t get any traffic coming to your pages.<\/p>\n
To prevent this, you just need to add the following code to your WordPress .htaccess<\/code> file. This will prevent other sites from using your images on their pages.<\/p>\nRewriteEngine on\r\nRewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$\r\nRewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?:\/\/(www\\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]\r\nRewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?:\/\/(www\\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com\/yourdomain [NC]\r\nRewriteRule \\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ \u2013 [NC,F,L]\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/span>Use the Latest PHP Version<\/span><\/h2>\nWordPress is written in the PHP language – which means that all WordPress instances use a PHP hosting server. Sometimes, it is possible that your hosting company is running an older PHP version, or your server simply has an outdated version installed. Usually, the latest PHP version is faster and more secure than its previous version. Make sure to keep your PHP version up-to-date to help boost the performance of your website.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Disable Unwanted Plugins<\/span><\/h2>\nThere are lots of plugins available on the WordPress market. Installing unwanted plugins on your WordPress websites may affect your site\u2019s performance. Having additional unnecessary plugins installed will also increase the size of your backup and put a larger amount of load on your server while taking a backup or serving website content. So it is recommended to uninstall any unnecessary plugins from your WordPress website.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Cleanup WordPress Database<\/span><\/h2>\nWhenever you install WordPress plugins or themes, new tables are added to the database. After deleting unused plugins, the tables stay behind. This will increase the size of the WordPress database over time and may impact WordPress’ database performance, and in conjunction, your website performance. This makes it a good idea to clean up your WordPress site regularly. Your database accumulates a lot of extra data, such as revisions, spam comments, trashed comments, data from plugins you are no longer using, and more. Database cleanup process removes all of this unnecessary data. This can significantly reduce your database size which speeds up your backup process.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Enable GZIP compression<\/span><\/h2>\nGZIP is a file format and software application used for file compression and decompression. It is enabled on the server-side and reduces the size of your HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript files. Enabling GZIP compression will dramatically reduce the bandwidth usage and the time it takes to gain access to your website.<\/p>\n
To enable GZIP compression, just add the following lines to your WordPress .htaccess<\/code> file:<\/p>\n<IfModule mod_deflate.c>\r\n # Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/javascript\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/rss+xml\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/vnd.ms-fontobject\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/x-font\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/x-font-opentype\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/x-font-otf\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/x-font-truetype\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/x-font-ttf\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/x-javascript\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/xhtml+xml\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application\/xml\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font\/opentype\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font\/otf\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font\/ttf\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image\/svg+xml\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image\/x-icon\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/css\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/html\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/javascript\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/plain\r\n AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text\/xml\r\n # Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)\r\n BrowserMatch ^Mozilla\/4 gzip-only-text\/html\r\n BrowserMatch ^Mozilla\/4\\.0[678] no-gzip\r\n BrowserMatch \\bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text\/html\r\n Header append Vary User-Agent\r\n<\/IfModule>\r\n<\/pre>\n