Server Management – Server Side Includes

This month we discuss: Server Side Includes (SSI) Ever wonder how to make website maintenance an easy, less time consuming task? Well, perhaps one of the best ways is to implement Server Side Includes (SSI) on all your HTML pages. The use of SSI will minimize your coding time by sharing code between multiple HTML files. Moreover, all changes to the included file will take effect immediately for all HTML pages which include that file.

The most common use of SSI is for headers and footers of HTML pages. The reason for this is because these two elements of a website are generally the same on every page regardless of the content for that page. Consequently, if a change is to be made to the mailing address of the company it is changed once in the include file and that’s it! The change is instantly carried across the entire website. This may not seem so beneficial if you have a small site with less than 20 pages, but imagine your website has 100’s or 1000’s of pages (like many sites do) it would take hours to complete a simple address change on every page…SSI makes it easy.

As websites become more complex in structure and greater in size, it is important to use techniques which ease the workload for maintenance and guarantee consistency across the entire site. By using SSI in your website, you will have more time to develop and implement new features and content rather than spending your time changing addresses.