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How to Redirect and Forcing WWW in URL with .htaccess file

Written April 2018. Microsoft changes these admin screens often, so the screenshots below may not match what you see today. The sequence of steps is usually still correct — if something looks wrong, tell us and we'll update it.

Redirecting a URL

Using Redirect in an .htaccess file enables you to redirect users from an old page to a new page without having to keep the old page. For example, if you use index.html as your index file and then later rename index.html to home.html, you could set up a redirect to send users from index.html to home.html. For example:

Redirect /path/to/old/file/old.html http://www.example.com/new/file/new.html

The first path to the old file must be a local UNIX path, NOT the full path. So, if the .htaccess file is in the directory /example.com, you would not include /home/exampleuser/example.com in the local UNIX path. The first / represents the example.com directory. If the old file was in that directory, you would follow the / with the old file name.

The second path to the new file can be a local UNIX path, but can also be a full URL to link to a page on a different server or the same server.

Forcing www in the URL

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

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