Wordpress

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

— Donald Knuth

As part of updating my Wordpress Installation for the arrival of https://paulsaunders.org.uk, I decided I’d need to add some caching in order to cope with the extra visitors. In addition, with it being a Multisite, I figured there’d be some common assets which could be cached nicely between the different sites.

One of the issues of moving to a Multisite Wordpress setup was managing the robots.txt and sitemap.xml files. robots.txt is a text file that lives at the root of a website (so, in my case, at /robots.txt); search engines are supposed to read that as the first stage of crawling a site and the file tells them what they can and can’t index. The sitemap.xml sits along side the robots.txt file and assists search engines by telling them what pages exist and information about them.