When you move your website to a new domain, you need to redirect pages to another domain. Here’s how to easily redirect page to another domain with .htaccess file in Apache web server. There are multiple ways to redirect page to another domain. We will look at each of them.
How To Redirect Page To Another Domain With .htaccess File
Here are the steps to redirect page to another domain with .htaccess file. Please ensure that you have enabled mod_rewrite in your Apache web server configuration. Only then your .htaccess configuration will be applied by Apache server.
If you have enabled htaccess using mod_rewrite, you can skip to step 4.
1. Enable mod_rewrite
Open terminal and run the following command to enable mod_rewrite on Ubuntu/Debian systems.
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
If mod_rewrite is already enabled, you will see an alert message.
Restart Apache web server
$ sudo systemctl restart apache2
Bonus Read : How to Disable Apache Cache
2. Enable .htaccess in Apache Server
By default, Apache does not allow the use of .htaccess file. So open the default Apache server configuration file
$ sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
Add the following lines just before </VirtualHost> line.
<Directory /var/www/html> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory>
Restart Apache web server
$ sudo systemctl restart apache2
Bonus Read : How to Enable mod_ssl in Apache
3. Create .htaccess file
Open terminal and create .htaccess file
$ sudo vi /var/www/html/.htaccess
Make sure to add the following line at the top of your .htaccess file
RewriteEngine on
4. Redirect Page to Another Domain using .htaccess file
Let’s say you want to redirect page /product.html to another domain www.newsite.com. There are multiple ways to redirect page to another domain using .htaccess file.
Redirect Page to Another Domain using Redirect
Add the following Redirect directive to redirect your page to another domain. Redirect statement requires 2 arguments – source URL path and destination URL path. You can use either absolute URL paths or relative URL paths
Redirect /product.html http://www.newsite.com/product.html
If you want to permanently redirect page to another domain, just add 301 after Redirect directive, as shown
Redirect 301 /product.html http://www.newsite.com/product.html
If you want to redirect all pages to new domain root, just add the following line to .htaccess
Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/
Redirect directive will redirect all URLs that begin with the URL prefix (e.g /product.html) you specified. Redirect will also redirect URLs with parameters to new domain.
Bonus Read : How to Redirect 404 to Homepage using .htaccess
Redirect Page to Another Domain using RedirectMatch
You can also use RedirectMatch directive to redirect your page to another domain.
Redirect statement will redirect pages that begin with specified URL prefix but RedirectMatch will redirect all pages that match a specified Regular expression
RedirectMatch statement requires 2 arguments – regular expression to match and destination URL path.
RedirectMatch ^/product.html http://www.newsite.com/product.html
If you want to permanently redirect page to another domain, just add 301 after RedirectMatch directive, as shown
RedirectMatch 301 ^/product.html http://www.newsite.com/product.html
RedirectMatch directive will redirect all URLs that begin with the Regex (e.g /product.html) you specified. RedirectMatch will also redirect URLs with parameters to new domain
Also Read : How to Password Protect Directory in Apache
5. Restart Apache Server
Restart Apache web server
$ sudo systemctl restart apache2
Now your Apache web server will automatically redirect page to another domain.
Ubiq makes it easy to visualize data in minutes, and monitor in real-time dashboards. Try it Today!
