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htaccess Redirect
How to redirect webpages
The .htaccess file is a small text document that generally sits in the same location as your index.php or index.htm pages. It gives you the ability to interact with Apache on an individual domain-to-domain and directory-to-directory basis.
You can place the htaccess file anywhere where you’d like to control the flow of visitors. So for instance you can protect directories and redirect the traffic visiting those pages. This page will show you how to use the .htaccess file to redirect your visitors in different ways. Note that this is a powerful system file, if the syntax is incorrect in anyway, it could render your site unusable. Always take a backup.
The use of 301 in a redirect will tell the search engines that it is a permenant redirection
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Redirect to another page
To redirect one page to another page:
Redirect /old-index.html http://www.mynewwebsite.com/foldername/new-index.html
Redirect to another website
To redirect an entire website from one url to another. The “301” tells the search engines it is a permanant redirection.
Redirect 301 / http://www.mynewwebsite.com
Redirect index to subdirectory
To redirect a page to a subdirectory:
Redirect /index.html http://www.mynewwebsite.com/foldername
Redirect filepaths
To redirect a filepath to another filepath:
Redirect /foldername/filename.html http://www.mynewwebsite.com/foldername2/filename.html
Redirect everything matching
If you’ve removed a blog category, instead of doing mutilple Redirects, you can create 1 record that directs everything that matches. Like and using a “*” /equipment-hire/*
RedirectMatch 301 /equipment-hire/ http://www.example.com/new-equipment/
To change file extention
If you’ve changed your pages from .html to .php:
RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.example.com$1.php
Specifying folder default page
To change the default webpage loaded by the server:
DirectoryIndex index.php
Redirect www to non-www
To redirect http://www.mysite.com to http://mysite.com:
RewriteCond % ^www\.mynewwebsite\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mynewwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Redirect non-www to www
To redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com:
RewriteCond % !^www\.mynewwebsite\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mynewwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Give 307 ‘Site Under Maintenance’ Header on all webpage requests
To return a 307 Site Under Maintenance header to those visiting the site. Create a temporary file called 307.php and inside it place the message to give to your visitors and upload it to your public root directory.
Next create a totally separate .htaccess file called .htaccess.307 with the following text:
RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /
# Before using this htaccess, you have to change this digits to match your
# own IP address: This will keep you with access to the site. as long as
# your IP doesn't change: http://whatismyip.com
RewriteCond % !^123\.123\.123\.123$
# The last 2 lines take the site offline. the basically say if: page request is
# NOT 307.php, show 307.php but only once. Stops it from looping endlessly.
RewriteCond % !^/307\.php$
# The browser gets this bit, so you need the full website address.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/307.php [R=307,L]
The above includes comments for your convenience. To get the redirect up and running, rename your existing .htaccess file to live.htaccess then rename this one to .htaccess
Alternative Redirect 1: Meta Refresh
It’s also possible to redirect traffic when visiting a page with the following line inside the head tag.
To do an immediate redirect:
To redirect after 5 seconds:
Alternative Redirect 2: PHP Header Redirect
You’re able to redirect traffic by putting the following line at the very top of a php document (nothing can be above it).
<?php
header (‘HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
header( “http://www.new-website.com” );
?>
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