Redirect index.html and index.php to the home page
How to redirect index.html and index.php to the home page. We recently did some website work for a local business. The business was using a static html website and we wanted to convert the site to a WordPress based platform for multiple reasons. During the conversion, we needed to not only perform 301 redirects for all of the currently indexed html pages, but also perform a redirect for the index.html page. This was a bit more complicated as you cannot simply perform a 301 redirect on an index page. Here is how we did it.
Note: In the following examples, replace http://www.yoursite.com/ with your actual site.
How to redirect both index.html and index.php to the home page:
- Login via an ftp client to the folder containing your site
- Copy the .htaccess file to your desktop
- Using a text editor (I prefer notepad++), open the .htaccess file
- At the top of the .htaccess file add the following code:
- Next, save the changes and upload the .htaccess file to your server
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
How to redirect index.html to the home page:
- Login via an ftp client to the folder containing your site
- Copy the .htaccess file to your desktop
- Using a text editor (I.E. notepad++), open the .htaccess file
- At the top of the .htaccess file add the following code:
- Next, save the changes and upload the .htaccess file to your server
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
How to redirect index.php to the home page:
By default WordPress takes care of redirecting index.php to / however, it's not a bad idea to set a rule for this.
- Login via an ftp client to the folder containing your site
- Copy the .htaccess file to your desktop
- Using a text editor (I.E. notepad++), open the .htaccess file
- At the top of the .htaccess file add the following code:
- Next, save the changes and upload the .htaccess file to your server
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
From now on, any requests made to index.html or index.php depending on which conditions and rules you used, should result in a redirect to the home page I.E. www.yoursite.com
Enjoy! 🙂