After a site redesign, I've got a couple of pages that need to be redirected. Everything is staying on the same domain, just a couple of things have been reorganised and/or renamed. They are of the form:
/contact.php
is now:
/contact-us.php
Using the .htaccess file, I've added this line, which is the one I find recommended most:
RedirectMatch 301 /contact.php /contact-us.php
This is mostly fine - it does the job - the problem is, it also redirects:
- /team1/contact.php
- /non-existant-folder/contact.php
Is there a way of specifying that I only want to redirect the contact.php in the root?
RedirectMatch uses a regular expression that is matched against the URL path. And your regular expression /contact.php just means any URL path that contains /contact.php but not just any URL path that is exactly /contact.php. So use the anchors for the start and end of the string (^ and $):
RedirectMatch 301 ^/contact\.php$ /contact-us.php
This should do it
RedirectPermanent /contact.php /contact-us.php
redirect 301 /contact.php /contact-us.php
There is no point using the redirectmatch rule and then have to write your links so they are exact match. If you don't include you don't have to exclude! Just use redirect without match and then use links normally
You could also use a RewriteRule if you wanted the ability to template match and redirect urls.
If you prefer to use the simplest possible solution to a problem, an alternative to RedirectMatch is, the more basic, Redirect directive.
It does not use pattern matching and so is more explicit and easier for others to understand.
i.e
<IfModule mod_alias.c>
#Repoint old contact page to new contact page:
Redirect 301 /contact.php http://example.com/contact-us.php
</IfModule>
Query strings should be carried over because the docs say:
Additional path information beyond the matched URL-path will be
appended to the target URL.
It will redirect your store page to your contact page
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /storepage /contactpage
</IfModule>
