Changes to my .htaccess file made my site very slow. What did I do wrong, and how can I fix?

Question

I recently made changes to my .htaccess file as instructed on http://www.roimarketing.co.nz/articles/what-is-referrer-spam-how-can-you-block-it/

I had been having problems with bots crawling my site and making it hard to interpret analytics on it. After adding the code shown in the link above, the site takes a minute+ to load each page where-as before it took barely 5 seconds. What did I do wrong, and how can I fix? Chances are I'm making a rookie mistake I've overlooked.

Website in question: royalelectric.com

I edited the .htaccess file from my /public_html/ directory.

Here was my old .htaccess file:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Here is my new .htaccess file:

## STOP REFERRER SPAM ##
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?4webmasters\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?site1.free-share-buttons\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?site2.free-share-buttons\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?site3.free-share-buttons\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?site4.free-share-buttons\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?anticrawler\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?addons\.mozilla\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?baidu\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?bestwebsitesawards\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?best-seo-solution\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?best-seo-offer\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?blackhatworth\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?buttons-for-website\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?buttons-for-your-website\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?buy-cheap-online\.info [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?econom\.co [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?darodar\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?sanjosestartups\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?free-social-buttons\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?guardlink\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?event-tracking\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?domination\.ml [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?hulfingtonpost\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?Get-Free-Traffic-Now\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?googlsucks\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?free-share-buttons\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?humanorightswatch\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?ilovevitaly\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?7makemoneyonline\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?o-o-6-o-o\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?priceg\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?social-buttons\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?semalt\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?smailik\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?theguardlan\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?simple-share-buttons\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]
## STOP REFERRER SPAM ##


# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Any help you can give me here would be greatly appreciated, as I'm sick of dealing with the bots screwing up my analytics but I don't want to sacrifice load times to fix the problem. Thanks!

Answer 1

The simple rewrite rules shouldn't slow down your website. Unless there is some misplaced code causing it, check if the rest of the code is ok, and since this file is very sensitive always make a backup before editing it, because it can shut down your site.

Most of those lines are useless because your are trying to block something that doesn't access your site. The only ones that are really useful are these 5 from crawlers

## STOP REFERRER SPAM ##
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?best-seo-solution\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?best-seo-offer\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?7makemoneyonline\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?buttons-for-website\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^([^.]+.)*?buttons-for-your-website\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]
## STOP REFERRER SPAM ##

To keep clean your .htaccess file, you should delete rest because that's ghost spam, it doesn't have any interaction with your website, and that's what these rules does, block the access to your website.

The ghost spam hits your reports directly, so to stop them the only solution is to create a filter in Google Analytics.

You can find more information about the solution and the spam here

https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362

https://stackoverflow.com/a/29645325/3197362