A permanent 301 redirect in your .htaccess file lets search engines and others know that a old link has been replaced by a new one. It's the recommended method for directing traffic from an existing page.
Some common uses of a 301 .htaccess redirect:
- Redirect individual files on the same domain
An old file has moved locations, or the information is now contained in a new file.
- Redirect an old domain to a new domain
You've moved a website from an old domain to a new one, and you want any old links to go to the new site.
- Force www. version of domain to be used or you can force non www. version of domain to be used
Visitors access and link to your website in multiple ways such as example.com, and www.example.com and you can set one as the preferred method that your site displays.
- Redirect all files with certain extension
You used to have all of your files using an extension like .php and have converted everything to .htm so using a 301 redirect you can update all links to use the new extension.
You have the ability to setup redirects for a domain in your cPanel interface one at a time, or following the steps below you can modify your .htaccess file directly to add these manually yourself.
Redirect individual files
To redirect individual files, like example.com/oldfile.htm to newfile.htm you can use a 301 redirect like this:
Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm /newfile.htm
To redirect one specific file to another domain such as example.com/oldfile.htm to example.net/newfile.htm:
Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm http://example.net/newfile.htm
Redirect an old domain to a new domain
If you had an old domain such as example.com, and now you decided you actually want to use example.net for the website. You could setup a 301 redirect for the entire domain, so that old links to example.com carry over.
Option #1
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.net/$1 [L,R=301,NC]
The following two examples redirect all URLs on your current website to a second website. This is useful after you have migrated your site to a new domain name.
Option #2
Redirect 301 / https://example.com/
Force www. version of domain to be used
A search engine like Google would see example.com and www.example.com as essentially two separate websites. They recommend you pick one version you'd like search engines to display and using a 301 redirect is a possible option.
If you have a lot of links on the web where people are linking to your site as example.com, but you would like your visitors to instead end up at www.example.com you can force this version of your domain with these rules:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]
Force non www. version of domain to be used
If you have a lot of links on the web where people are linking to your site as www.example.com, but you would like your visitors to instead end up at example.com you can force this version of your domain with these rules:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]
Redirect all files with certain extension
To re-direct all of one type of file to another, such as example.com/file.php to example.com/file.htm
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .php$
RewriteRule ^(.*).php$ /$1.htm [R=301,L]
