.htaccess redirects scratchpad

Redirects are a frequent request for me during my working day. Clients moving their sites around, sandbox projects changing domains and other such reasons often call for legacy URLs to be handled with care. While using .htaccess files slows down your Apache http server, I personally don’t know enough (yet) about httpd config to use that instead. So enter my .htaccess redirect scratchpad:

General Redirects

Enforce a trailing slash

Problems can occur where links appear in analytics from URLs with both a slash and not. A quick way to rectify is to enforce a trailing slash. Google treats these URLs the same as each other as long as there isn’t duplicate content.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]

Redirect root domain

This will redirect (301) the entire domain while preserving the path:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !new-example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://new-example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Wildcard domain to single URL

Recently had a client close down their site to merge it into another. SEO impact aside I redirected all pages to a specific URL using the following snippet:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://{website URL} [R=301]

WordPress htaccess redirects

You can often still experience redirect loops when using Apache http->https rewrite behind load balancer / CDN (like Cloudflare). In amongst the other SSL tricks for WordPress using this HTAccess code has worked wonders for me:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule .* https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]