How to redirect a URL via .htaccess (setting 301 redirects)

301 Redirect, also known as permanent redirection, informs search engines that a specific address has been permanently moved to another location. It is commonly used to handle duplicate content, website relocation, or redirecting non-existent pages to new ones.

In Apache2, we use the mod_rewrite module to achieve this, and the configuration is done in the .htaccess file.

In the .htaccess file, we enable the mod_rewrite module with the following line:

RewriteEngine On

After that, we can perform redirects using the following methods:

# Redirects all URLs containing 'old-url' in the name
Redirect 301 old-url new-url

# Redirects URLs containing '/old-url/' in the name
RedirectMatch 301 ^/old-url/(.*)$ /new-url/$1

# Redirects to the result if the condition is met
RewriteCond %condition% &
RewriteRule %result%

Examples

# Individual pages
Redirect 301 /old-url.html http://mydomain.com/new-url

# Individual folders
RedirectMatch 301 ^/old-folder/(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/new-folder/$1

# From www.mydomain.com to mydomain2.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mydomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain2.com/$1 [L,R=301]

You can find instructions on how to set up HTTP to HTTPS redirection in the guide How to Redirect HTTP to HTTPS.