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Proper MIME Types

What are MIME Types?

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) types tell browsers how to handle specific extensions. MIME types are often used to handle new technologies as they appear. When WAP technology first appeared, no one had these extensions set up on their server. However, users could have set it up with MIME types and begun serving WAP pages immediately.

For example, the text/html MIME type equates to .htm, .HTML, and .shtml extensions on most servers; and this tells your browser to interpret all files with those extensions as HTML files.

How to add or edit MIME types in cPanel

  1. Log in to cPanel.
  2. Scroll to the Advanced section, then click on the MIME Types icon. 

    MIME icon

  3. You will be redirected to the MIME Types page. Here, you can add and alter new MIME types specifically for your site. Here is an example of the cPanel interface:

    MIME Types

Note: You cannot alter the system-defined MIME type values.

In the example above, Apache is being told to treat .html and .htm files as PHP files. This is helpful if your .html files have PHP code inside, but you cannot rename the files to the .php extension; however, this is notably more resource-intensive and should be used cautiously. 

MIME types in Plesk

Please see the Plesk User Guide article on Adding/Removing MIME types in Plesk.