301 Redirect WordPress Posts To New Domain

by Nish Vamadevan on 01/04/2008 · View Comments

301 Redirect is considered as a permanent redirect compared to a 302 redirect which is temporary. Therefore when moving wordpress to a new domain, it is a good idea to redirect all the posts to the new domain.

This way all the search engine records will be kept intact and this means you won’t lose any traffics / hits to the website.

This doesn’t mean redirecting from nishv.com to fnode.com, it will also redirect every single URL associated with nishv.com to fnode.com.

For instance, if a user is looking for a particular post and goes to nishv.com, they will be redirected to the corresponding post on fnode.com

Here is an example of one of the most popular post on the site…

http://www.nishv.com/2007/06/02/make-bisoncam-work-on-windows-vista/

When users clicks on the above link, they will be automatically redirect to

http://www.fnode.com/2007/06/02/make-bisoncam-work-on-windows-vista/

This way, the user won’t notice the domain change because it is 99% directed via search engine or linked URL.

This method is also a good way to let GoogleBot to know that the domain has been moved permanently from nishv.com to fnode.com

Here is the code below and I used which goes into the .htaccess file. All you got to do is to replace the URL to make it work with your own domain.


# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nishv.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.fnode.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END WordPress

{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }

1 John July 30, 2008 at 11:50

Where do I put the code exactly?

I’m moving http://blog.photographythoughts.com
to
http://photographythoughts.wordpress.com

The permalinks structure is kept intact. At this moment I’ve made a change to the singe post file as follows:

But this only forwards to the main page.

Reply

2 John July 30, 2008 at 11:53

Sorry the code didn’t came along with the previous comment:
” ”
Hope this works.

Reply

3 John August 19, 2008 at 02:45

Nish,

What if I want to 301 posts from one wordpress domain to another domain with a different permalink structure?

Reply

4 Nish Vamadevan August 25, 2008 at 00:37

@John

You need to do that on .htaccess file… You will only get access to that file if you host your own blog.

Reply

5 j. noronha August 25, 2008 at 16:22

Thanks a lot, this piece of code was a life savior. I’ve spent the last two days trying to accomplish this redirect with no success at all. Now it works like a charm.

Reply

6 Nish Vamadevan August 25, 2008 at 21:22

Glad to hear it!

Reply

7 frogstr September 19, 2008 at 18:41

Thanks buddy, that helped me make a smooth domain transition!

Reply

8 Josh January 11, 2009 at 14:23

First of all congratulation for such a great site. I learned a lot reading here today. I will make sure i visit this site more often so I can learn more.

Reply

9 Jehzeel Laurente March 13, 2009 at 14:16

this is what I’m looking for. :) I tried it and it works in a snap :) Thank you so much ^_^

Reply

10 Adrain February 17, 2010 at 04:49

i am trying to redirect my site on wordpress.com e.g XXXX.wordpress.com to my self hosted blog. now there is no way i can alter wordpress.com blog. Please help me

Reply

11 Nish Vamadevan February 18, 2010 at 22:39

You can’t do it, you need to have access / .htaccess…

Reply

12 Anand Srinivasan March 1, 2010 at 19:04

Hi Nish

Amazing post..Thanks a lot..Where do I post these 5 lines of code?

Also, will this help in retaining all the in-links that I have built for my older site?

Reply

13 Nish Vamadevan April 3, 2010 at 09:44

Anand, You should be able to retain everything and it will be a seemless transformation for the users… All info goes into the .htaccess file.

Reply

Leave a Comment

{ 1 trackback }

blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post:

Next post: