Automatic rewrite rules

[rahul286]

For WordPress sites, as site grows old it is cluttered with 301/302 redirects.

Some plugins add these redirects. Some are handled by WordPress core (e.g. slug changes). But in both cases, a request reaches PHP.

Idea is to monitor access.log, say daily for a site, find 301/302 and create rewrite rules for that sites so redirects will be much faster and php/mysql will be saved from some work.

[rahul286]

Rewrites will use this syntax:

location = old-url-1 { return 301 new-url-1; }

Courtesy: Igor Sysoev - http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,248659,248661#msg-248661

[etcook]

Rahul - this is an incredible idea!

[henrich-m]

Awesome idea! 👍

[rahul286]

Over the time I realized this is not worth the efforts.

The performance saving is minimal since Nginx page cache can store 301/302 responses too. So only first hit will reach PHP.

Having its done via Nginx requires all involved people to ping to Sys team. So we ourself started using https://wordpress.org/plugins/safe-redirect-manager/ . This is a nice plugin 10up and we recommended by redirect handling.