Why?

There are a couple of reasons for using .htaccess redirects instead of PHP or even Javascript. First of all, it’s very simple. There is no need to edit any files, you just need to change the .htaccess file. Imagine you need to redirect a whole directory of your site, with hundreds of pages. If you would use Javascript, you had to change every file, or at least use some search and replace commands to get the javascript on every page. With .htaccess you can easily redirect a whole directory.

It’s easy, but it’s also better for SEO to use .htaccess redirects. You can specify the type of your redirect, either temporarily (302) or permanent (301). You can’t do that with Javascript.

So now you know why you should use .htaccess redirects, now let’s take a look to how you use it.

How?

If you haven’t made a .htaccess file yet, make one. See the previous tutorial for details.

This is the basic syntax of a .htaccess redirect:
Redirect /olddirectory http://www.newdomain.com/newdirectory

But if you want to redirect that directory permanent, don’t forget to add 301 or permanent:
Redirect 301 /olddirectory http://www.newdomain.com/newdirectory
Redirect permanent /olddirectory http://www.newdomain.com/newdirectory

Redirecting a whole site
You can use this code to redirect a whole site to a new domain:
Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/

RedirectMatch

You can use redirectmatch for some more complicated redirects. Let’s take a look at the previous example, where I used Redirect 301 to move a whole site. I you would go to http://www.olddomain.com/contact you would be redirect to http://www.newdomain.com/. So it doesn’t matter what you incoming page is, you would always be redirected to the homepage of the new domain. If you don’t want that to happen then you can use Redirectmatch to redirect your whole site. This code will redirect a visitor (or search engine) to the same file at the new domain:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/

Did this tutorial helped you? Please leave a comment and tell how this tutorial helped you.

How to make a .htaccess file

A .htaccess file is very easy to make. I always use Notepad to modify it. But you have to pay attention when you save the file. .htaccess is the extension of the file, not the name. The file must no be for example .htaccess.txt but just .htaccess . The .htaccess file must be uploaded to your root folder to make everything work.

Custom 404-error page

It is not hard to make you own custom 404-error page with .htaccess. First make a new file. This will be your error page. For example call it 404.html and place it in your root directory. There are loads of articles about “the perfect 404-page”. Some things include: adding a search box so people can search the site for what they were looking for, adding a e-mail adress to contact the webmaster, etc. There are nice articles about this on A List Apart and Coding Horror. This is what you have to place in your .htaccess file in our example:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

This is only the 404 error, but there are loads of errors that you can make custom pages for. A list:

• 302 – Redirect
• 400 – Bad Request
• 401 – Authorization Required
• 402 – Payment Required
• 403 – Forbidden
• 404 – File Not Found
• 405 – Method Not Allowed
• 406 – Not Acceptable
• 407 – Proxy Authentication Required
• 408 – Request Time-out
• 409 – Conflict
• 410 – Gone
• 411 – Length Required
• 412 – Precondition Failed
• 413 – Request Entity Too Large
• 414 – Request-URI Too Large
• 415 – Unsupported Media Type
• 500 – Internal Server Error
• 501 – Method Not Implemented
• 502 – Bad Gateway
• 503 – Service Temporarily Unavailable
• 504 – Gateway Time-out
• 505 – HTTP Version Not Supported

I’ll write more .htaccess tutorials soon.