Nginx vs. Apache, All Things Considered
-
Hey Peeps,
I've been struggling lately with a new static site, and I'm looking for anyone's opinion who's had to optimize a site using Nginx. I understand that Nginx is recommended for static sites, however I want to avoid being in a situation where I can't do things like write redirect rules the way I want to.
Considering that it will be hosting a Static site, are there any features or functions that Nginx lacks when compared to Apache, such as ability to write rewrite rules, etc.?
-
Great to hear. Let me know if you have any question when you start that project.
Casey
-
Yup, I'm in the same boat as you, I'd much rather do server-side redirects..
As an update on this "project", we used the pageless redirects in our staging environment on S3 just now, but were unsuccessful. Certain redirects that we set up in pageless redirects, (such as adding a trailing slash to URLs without,) got clobbered by S3's default setting of 302ing to adding a trailing slash. Weak sauce, Amazon!
At this point, we're going with Apache, since it's the App that our developers know best and we've had too many problems to experiment with our live environment. This being said, our next project after we relaunch with proper redirects will be to begin testing on our stage with Nginx
Thanks for your input!
-
Hey Danny,
I've always done 301 redirects from the server and avoided any other method. This was more for my sanity to make sure that I was getting all the equity I could if there was a difference, not saying there is a difference but if there way, I wanted to be safe. Since it sounds like you may be constrained by your technology, the solution you are going with is fine but if you had both options available, I'd go with the server side redirect always.
-
Thanks Casey!
We've actually found a different work-around that we are looking at right now, using the "pageless redirects" plugin for Jekyll. Basically it uses the meta refresh + rel canon redirection method that Matt Cutts got called out on a while ago. This would allow us to stay on S3 and maintain our blazing fast site speed.
Through my research so far, this seems to pass equity in much the same way as a Server App 301.. Have you had any experiences/heard anything to the contrary?
-
Hi Danny,
The Moz.com website/blog are running on PHP/Nginx. As Matthew said, Nginx is much faster and less intensive on the servers for both CPU and memory. Nginx has some great documentation and is really easy to get things to redirect. It's as easy as adding lines like the following to your configuration and your good to go:
rewrite ^/q$ /community/q permanent;
rewrite ^/q/(.*)$ /community/q/$1 permanent;Making the switch from Apache to Nginx was one of the best things we ever did and I would highly suggest you do the same thing for both static and any dynamic sites you may have. I'll most likely never use Apache again.
Casey
-
From the little I know of Nginx, I know it is meant to be faster, less intensive on server memory and able to handle more concurrent connections, but Apache is more widely supported across different servers and is more flexible out of the box.
The one thing I have had to get my head around in working on clients sites that run on Nginx is the different URL rewrite rules i.e. http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/converting_rewrite_rules.html
-
Thanks Jeff!
I think we're going to go with Apache for now, since it's what all of us are well-versed in. We'll probably be switching to Nginx at some point in the future, and focusing on other aspects that you mentioned, such as caching and compression, in the meantime.
Cheers.
-
Danny - We use Nginx on our WordPress site, and it's pretty quick and easy. We're able to use the same .htaccess rules to handle rewrites, and for the most part, there's very little downside. You do want to make sure that your site isn't going to break before you launch it on Nginx, so I'd test it with a test URL first before you push it live.
We're also running Varnish as a caching system, and our page load speed takes the page from a slowwww load time to a really fast 1.5 second load time.
Hope this helps...
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Http:// vs Https:// in Og:URL
Hi, Recently, we have migrated our website from http:// to https://. Now, every URL is in https:// and we have used 301 permanent redirection for redirecting OLD URL's to New Ones. We have planned to include http:// link in og:url instead of https:// due to some social share issues we are facing. My concern is, if Google finds the self http:// URL on every page of my blog, will Google gets confused with http and https:// as we are providing the old URL to Google for crawling. Please advice. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia0 -
JSON-LD meta data: Do you have any rules/recommendations for using BlogPosting vs Article?
Dear Moz Community. I'm looking at moving from in-line Microdata in the HTML to JSON-LD on the web pages that I manage. Seems a far simpler solution having all the meta data in one place - especially for trouble shooting! With this in mind I've started to change the page templates on my personal site before I tackle the ones for my eCommerce site. I've made a start, and I'm still working on the templates producing some default values (like if a page doesn't have an associated image) but have been wondering if any of you have any rules/recommendations for using BlogPosting vs Article? I'd call this type of page an Article:
Technical SEO | | andystorey
https://cycling-jersey-collection.com/browse-collection/selle-italia-chinol-seb-bennotto-1982-team-jersey Whereas this page is from the /blog so that should probably be a BlogPosting:
https://cycling-jersey-collection.com/blog/2017-worldtour-team-jerseys I've used the following resources but it would be great to get a discussion on here.
https://yoast.com/structured-data-schema-ultimate-guide/
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/data-type-selector
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/ I'm keen to get this 100% right as once this is done I'm going to drive through some further changes to get some progress on things like this: https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/ranking-zero-seo-for-answers
https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/what-we-learned-analyzing-featured-snippets Kind Regards andy moz-screenshot.jpg1 -
Easy Question: regarding no index meta tag vs robot.txt
This seems like a dumb question, but I'm not sure what the answer is. I have an ecommerce client who has a couple of subdirectories "gallery" and "blog". Neither directory gets a lot of traffic or really turns into much conversions, so I want to remove the pages so they don't drain my page rank from more important pages. Does this sound like a good idea? I was thinking of either disallowing the folders via robot.txt file or add a "no index" tag or 301redirect or delete them. Can you help me determine which is best. **DEINDEX: **As I understand it, the no index meta tag is going to allow the robots to still crawl the pages, but they won't be indexed. The supposed good news is that it still allows link juice to be passed through. This seems like a bad thing to me because I don't want to waste my link juice passing to these pages. The idea is to keep my page rank from being dilluted on these pages. Kind of similar question, if page rank is finite, does google still treat these pages as part of the site even if it's not indexing them? If I do deindex these pages, I think there are quite a few internal links to these pages. Even those these pages are deindexed, they still exist, so it's not as if the site would return a 404 right? ROBOTS.TXT As I understand it, this will keep the robots from crawling the page, so it won't be indexed and the link juice won't pass. I don't want to waste page rank which links to these pages, so is this a bad option? **301 redirect: **What if I just 301 redirect all these pages back to the homepage? Is this an easy answer? Part of the problem with this solution is that I'm not sure if it's permanent, but even more importantly is that currently 80% of the site is made up of blog and gallery pages and I think it would be strange to have the vast majority of the site 301 redirecting to the home page. What do you think? DELETE PAGES: Maybe I could just delete all the pages. This will keep the pages from taking link juice and will deindex, but I think there's quite a few internal links to these pages. How would you find all the internal links that point to these pages. There's hundreds of them.
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Why use noindex, follow vs rel next/prev
Look at what www.shutterstock.com/cat-26p3-Abstract.html does with their search results page 3 for 'Abstract' - same for page 2-N in the paginated series. | name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW"> |
Technical SEO | | jrjames83
| | Why is this a better alternative then using the next/prev, per Google's official statement on pagination? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744 Which doesn't even mention this as an option. Any ideas? Does this improve the odds of the first page in the paginated series ranking for the target term? There can't be a 'view all page' because there are simply too many items. Jeff0 -
SEO Terms for Internal Vs External
Hey there! I am writing up an SEO plan for our company and wanted to get the groups input on the use of some SEO terms. I need to organize and explain these efforts to nonSEO people. I usually talk about, SEO in terms of "Internal" vs "External" efforts. Internal SEO efforts being things like Title Tags, Description Tags, Page Speed, Minimizing errors, proper 301 redirect, content development for the site, internal linking and anchor, etc. External SEO efforts being things like Link building, social media profile setups and posts (FB Twitter Pinterest, YouTube), PR work. How do you split these out? What terms do you use? Do you subdivide these tasks? What terms do you use? For example, with Internal, I sometimes talk about "Technical SEO" that has do to with making sure that site speed is working well, 301s are setup correctly, noindex tag etc are all used properly. These are things that different versus "On Page" efforts to use keywords properly etc. I will also use the term "Site Visibility" for non SEOs to explain the technical impact. For example, if your site has the wrong robots.txt, if you have 500 errors everywhere and a slow site, if you are sending spiders down a daisy chain of 301s, it is difficult for the key parts of your site to be found and so your "Visibility" to the engines are poor. You have to get your visibility up, before you begin to then worry about if you have the right keywords on a page etc. Any input or references would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Is use of javascript to simplify information architecture considered cloaking?
We are considering using javascript to format URLs to simplify the navigation of the googlebot through our site, whilst presenting a larger number of links for the user to ensure content is accessible and easy to navigate from all parts of the site. In other words, the user will see all internal links, but the search engine will see only those links that form our information hierarchy. We are therefore showing the search engine different content to the user only in so far as the search engine will have a more hierarchical information architecture by virture of the fact that there will be fewer links visible to the search engine to ensure that our content is well structured and discoverable. Would this be considered cloaking by google and would we be penalised?
Technical SEO | | JohnHillman0 -
Multiple title and description change is considered spam?
I'm changing title and description several times throught 1-2 months... will Google penalize me? I'm worried that testing several title and description ideas would affect the site rankings on google. Anyone had a problem with that... or can i continue testing as many titles and descriptions as i want?
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0 -
.htacess file format for Apache Server
Hi, My website having canonical issue for home page, I have written the .htaccess file and upload the root directory. But still I didn't see any changes in the home page. I am copying syntax which one I have written in the .htaccess file. Please review the syntax and let me know the changes. Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on #RewriteBase / re-direct index.htm to root / ### RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm$ /$1 [R=301,L] re-direct IP address to www ### re-direct non-www to www ### re-direct any parked domain to www of main domain RewriteCond %{http_host} !^www.metricstream.com$ [nc] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.metricstream.com/$1 [r=301,nc,L] Is there any specific htaccess file format for apache server? Thanks, Karthik
Technical SEO | | karthik-1755440