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Joel Rivera
29,401 PointsHow to handle .htaccess 301 redirect
I'm converting a website from a Closed Source CMS to WordPress. The old CMS has some ugly url's that have decent page rank. I want to clean them up.
They look like http://www.example.com/community/area/All%20of%20Mount%20Vernon/
And I want it to look like http://www.example.com/mount-vernon
What is the proper way to do this with htaccess? Also do I just put the 301 redirect in the WordPress htaccess file?
Note I don't have access to the other CMS files because it's closed source so I can't put any code into their system. Not sure if I would need to.
Thanks everyone
2 Answers
Sarah Bradberry
7,115 PointsI would put it in the root htaccess file because it's easier to keep track of, but more tech savvy folks might have a good reason that another option would be better.
Redirect 301 http://old-url http://new-url
You'll need to use regex to write a string that will redirect the files without the extra stuff. http://regexone.com/ is a good place to learn
Joel Rivera
29,401 PointsThe Redirection plugin seems to work well. Do you suggest leaving the trailing / in the redirect?
Sarah Bradberry
7,115 PointsYes, I leave it in.
Joel Rivera
29,401 PointsJoel Rivera
29,401 PointsThank you Sarah, What do you think about using a free htaccess generator like this one? http://seo-website-designer.com/HtAccess-301-Redirect-Generator or this one http://www.htaccessredirect.net/
Joel Rivera
29,401 PointsJoel Rivera
29,401 PointsAlso what do you think about the plugin called Redirection? http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
Sarah Bradberry
7,115 PointsSarah Bradberry
7,115 PointsI use the redirection plugin in my wordpress (I recently moved my blog to wordpress from movable type so I had lots of redirects). It's really good but you have to be careful of two things:
make sure you use the htaccess file in the root directory or you'll have to edit your redirects every time you're redirecting a 404.
It's also really easy to accidentally delete all your redirects. You can import them from the htaccess file though (don't ask how I know, lol).
You'll still need to know how to write regex strings if you want to move a lot of content from similar urls
The redirect generator looks really good. I'm only just learning how to write regex strings so that's going to come in handy, thanks! :)