After you install the WP Ghost plugin and select Safe Mode or Ghost Mode, make sure you follow the instructions based on your server type after you save the settings.
Now, if you follow all the notifications from Hide My WP settings, there are some situations when the website loads slower in frontend or the theme is now showing correctly:
Attention! Please check the rewrite rules in the config file. Some URLs pass through the config file rules and are loaded through WordPress, which may slow down your website or cause it not to load correctly.
On Apache & Litespeed servers
1. All the rewrite rules are loaded through the .htaccess file, which works instantly for Apache and Litespeed servers. If the rewrites are not loaded through .htaccess, they are handled by WordPress redirects, and as they use more resources, they will load slower.
To make sure the rules are loaded through .htaccess you need to first check the .htaccess file and you should see the rules starting with #BEGIN HMWP_RULES and ending with #END HMWP_RULES like in this example:
# BEGIN HMWP_RULES <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?ajax$ /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php [QSA,L] RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?custom-admin/(.*) /wp-admin/$2 [QSA,L] .......... </IfModule> # END HMWP_RULES
Also, ensure to activate AllowOverride All for your directory. See how to do this:
For Cyberpanel with LiteSpeed you need to specify the .htaccess path where you have the rewrites:
- Configure .htaccess in OpenLiteSpeed: A Step-by-Step Guide
- OpenLiteSpeed htaccess setup
- AutoLoad .htaccess with OpenLiteSpeed
- How to write Rewrite rules for OpenLiteSpeed!
If WP Ghost detects the rewrites are handled by WordPress and not by the config file, you will get a notification in the WP Ghost settings after you check your website as a visitor:

Solution: After saving the settings, change the .htaccess to read-only or to 0440 if you have Linux. This way, the rules will not be removed by other plugins.
2. When you enable the “Text Mapping in CSS and JS” option, all CSS and JavaScript URLs will load dynamically. This is the only way to modify the text within these files. However, even if you are using a cache plugin, you may notice that your website runs slower upon the first visit, since the CSS and JavaScript files are not cached initially.
If you want to use this option, use a cache plugin like Autoptimize or Litespeed Cache, combine all the CSS and JS files into one, preload cache in the background, and set the cache to be deleted once a week or even once a month.
We encourage you to switch off the option Text Mapping in CSS and JS files, as it does not improve security but only hides classes and IDs from theme detectors.
On Nginx servers
1. All the rewrite rules are loaded through the nginx.conf file, which works instantly for Nginx servers. If the rewrites are not loaded through the nginx.conf file, they are handled by WordPress redirects, and as they use more resources, they will load slower.
Make sure the rules are loaded through Nginx.conf, and that you restart the Nginx server after you change the paths.
Check if you have the line include path_to_file/hidemywp.conf added in nginx.conf file as detailed in these examples:
If WP Ghost detects the rewrites are handled by WordPress and not by the config file, you will get a notification in the Hide My WP settings after you check your website as a visitor:

On Windows IIS servers
1. All the rewrite rules are loaded through a web.config file, which works instantly for IIS servers with the URL Rewrites 2 tool installed. If the rewrites are not loaded through a web.config file, they are handled by WordPress redirects, and as they use more resources, they will load slower.
Make sure you added the rules in web.config and restarted IIS server after you changed the paths.
If WP Ghost detects the rewrites are handled by WordPress and not by the config file you will get a notification in the Hide My WP settings after you check your website as a visitor:

Other servers
For servers like Amazon Bitnami, Inmotion, WP Engine, Godaddy, Google Cloud, Flywheel, Kinsta, WPMUDEV, RunCloud, CloudPanel, Ploi, etc. please make sure you follow the instruction from WP Ghost after you save the settings:
- Bitnami Servers – WP Ghost Setup
- WP Engine – WP Ghost Setup
- Inmotion WordPress Hosting – WP Ghost Setup
- Enable AllowOverwrite on Google Cloud Platform
- Godaddy Hosting – WP Ghost Setup
- Amazon AWS Lightsail – WP Ghost Setup
- Flywheel Server – WP Ghost Setup
- Kinsta Server – WP Ghost setup
- WPMUDEV Server – WP Ghost Setup
- RunCloud – WP Ghost Setup
- Ploi.io Server – WP Ghost Setup