I recently came across an issue where one of our clients wanted to redirect only one page of their website to a different domain. This type of redirect did seem to be under-documented on the internet because as hard as I looked (about 2 minutes), I couldn’t find a semi-recent blog post for this specific issue.
So I thought that when I find out what the solution is, I’m going to write it myself, so here it is.
This one should be done in the .htaccess file of a website. For non-technical people, I highly recommend copying what’s already in the file to a notepad++ document, as a mistake could lead to the website going blank, which is obviously quite serious. If you do happen to make a mistake you can paste the original back in. If for some reason that doesn’t work or you are afraid that it won’t work, then you may want to invest in a daily backup of your website.
The example below would be used for the imaginary pages:
http://www.current-website.co.uk/redirecting-page/
which will redirect to
http://www.new-website.com/target-page/
Process
Go into .htaccess file of the current website, and add this underneath “RewriteEngine On” so it contains something like this (obviously change this to what you need):
RewriteRule ^redirecting-page/$ http://www.new-website.com/target-page/ [R=301]
Notice how current-website.co.uk isn’t included, as you only need the path of the page, nothing else.
Also remember to include the whole URL for the target website including http:// and trailing slashes.
Another thing to remember is that if the redirecting page ends in .html you will need to replace the . with a backslash.
So if the page was http://www.current-website.co.uk/redirecting-page.html,
in the Rewrite Rule it will look like ^redirectingpage\.html$
I hope you are now able to redirect one page of your website to a new domain.
If you need help improving your website performance, feel free to get in touch.
