Server Side Includes or SSI is a term which every webmaster and website owner must be aware of. This technology can make your life smoother and easier. You will reap benefits by setting it up at the beginning of your website or in the middle. Either way, SSI saves your valuable time spent in modifying and updating your site.

SSI is quite feature-rich. It contains countless features to enhance the functionality of your website. An ‘include’ file is a vital constituent of SSI which is a separate and distinct file and each web page can include it as an ingredient of the page file. People who have recently started learning FrontPage or HTML, must have an idea that every web page is a single HTML file. But, the number of files defined for a particular web page is five in reality. There must be a main HTML file without any doubt. There is also a style sheet designed with CSS and there are also a number of SSI ‘include’ files. Each include file has its own purpose. They might be used for navigation menus.

The main purpose of SSI is it facilitates the task of altering and updating of your website. Sometimes, you need to make some changes to each and every page or on some specific sections to every page. At the beginning of your website, there are not enough web pages. So modifying and updating is quite easy and less time-taking. You can do that manually; say on 10 pages by doing a cut-and-paste operation to alter the navigation menu 10 times. With your site grows larger with the addition of each new page, it becomes an uphill task to undertake updates manually. But SSI makes that task quite simple. All you need to do is to alter just one file and the modification happens on each and every page of the site containing that properties or elements.

Some other benefits of SSI include files include saving of considerable amount of space and quick downloading of web pages. As a single line code makes changes on all web pages what might have been hundreds of lines in every HTML file, you can maintain a lot smaller file sizes that ultimately results in occupying less space on your sever. The include files are loaded once with the first page of your site. As a result, the subsequent loading of pages happens faster.

Now, we will discuss the setting up of SSI. You need three things for this purpose. First, you require organizing your server for SSI. You need to ask certain questions to your web host. Some web hosts have their servers already configured for SSI. If SSI is already set up, you must inquire whether it has been set up to parse .html extensions to read SSI.

SSI needs to be set up for your account. If it is not done, then you have to search for .htaccess file in your root directory. You may not see this file using an FTP process. So go to your control panel and look for it. The .htaccess is a text file and can be created in Notepad and Word, if you don’t have it on the server.

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