Comments on: WordPress, 404s, and Load Time

By: Marty Thornley

Marty Thornley — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 01:10:10 +0000

Hey David,

Brilliant solution to one of the nagging problems with wordpress plugins. So many of them load missing files that don’t seem to be necessary, but slow down the page load.

I tried it out on my site and definitely seemed to notice some improvement.

Thanks fo sharing!

-Marty

By: David Walsh

David Walsh — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:04:43 +0000

@Egil: I did fix the plugin. Another reason I do this is because spammers try to hit my site all the time. For example:

http://davidwalsh.name/?russian-porn-site/chicks.txt

I don’t want then straining my resources.

If it’s an article bombing out, it wont have a “.” in it so I’m not worried about legit 404s not being caught.

By: Egil Hansen

Egil Hansen — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:00:31 +0000

Hi David

Great blog, a few suggestions for this entry though:

Have you considered just fixing the plugin so the visitor to your site do not have to “waste” a round trip to the server just to get an empty .css file? It seems to me to be the better fix for the problem you describe.

Your general “catch future errors” fix is OK. I would add some logging to it though, so you get notified when your page and/or a plugin is looking for a resource that is not there, and you can fix it rather than have it silently continue wasting visitors time with round trips to the server.

Regards, Egil.

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:07:44 +0000

This is pretty interesting David. I did place a little code on my own 404′s that tells me more information as to the users interaction. What page they were trying to get to and some other stuff that for the most part help me either correct the issue or at least konw whats going on and try to correct the problem.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:29:11 +0000

$ext = !empty($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) ? strtolower(pathname($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], PATHNAME_EXTENSION)) : null;
if(in_array($ext, array(‘jpg’, ‘css’, ‘whatever’)) die(”);

I like this one better :>

By: David Walsh

David Walsh — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:57:17 +0000

Since originally writing this article, I've made this check as just for the "." character:

if(strstr($uri,'.')) { die(''); }

Performance++!