Using Server Side Includes with HTML Files

Typically, when you use Server Side Includes, you’ll save the file with the shtml extension. This tells the server that it contains a SSI. If you have lots of files, renaming them with the shtml extension can be tedious. You can easily set up a htaccess rule to allow SSI with html files. If you are not familiar with server side includes, please read our article. 

Please keep in mind, if you do not have to do this, it is not recommended. Since you are directing the server to parse all HTML files it can slow down page load speeds.

Setting SSI to work over HTML

  1. Log into cPanel.
  2. Navigate to your .htaccess file using file manager in cPanel.
  3. Open the .htaccess file with code edit. At the top of the file add these lines of code:
    AddType text/html .shtml
    AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
    AddHandler server-parsed .html .htm

Now, when you use Server Side Includes you can use HTML pages as well. If you need further assistance please feel free to contact our support department

Carrie Smaha
Carrie Smaha Senior Manager Marketing Operations

Carrie enjoys working on demand generation and product marketing projects that tap into multi-touch campaign design, technical SEO, content marketing, software design, and business operations.

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2 thoughts on “Using Server Side Includes with HTML Files

  1. Useful, but not quite correct.
    The article has all the lines concatenated, but they should be separate:

    AddType text/html .shtml
    AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
    AddHandler server-parsed .html .htm

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