Site Redirects: forwarding a domain or page

With Site Redirects, you can automatically forward visitors to another address. You can forward your entire domain, for example to your new website or your page on an online shop platform, or just a single page, such as yourdomain.com/old to yourdomain.com/new.

Creating a redirect

1. At the top right, use the domain selector to choose the domain you want to forward.
2. In the menu, under Account Manager, click Site Redirects.
3. Click Add New Redirect.
4. Under Local URL Path (1), enter the path you want to forward. A forward slash is already there: type your path after it, for example old, so it reads /old. To forward the whole domain, just leave the forward slash as it is.
5. Under Redirect Type (2), choose the type of redirect (see below).
6. Under Destination URL (3), enter the full address. It already shows http://: replace this with the full address starting with https://, so it doesn't show http twice.
7. Click Add.

The redirect now appears in the list and works immediately.

Which type should you choose?

Deleting a redirect

Tick the redirect in the list and click Delete. In the Delete Redirect window, click Confirm.

Pitfalls

• The redirect doesn't work, or you end up in a loop. Site Redirects writes the rule to the .htaccess file in public_html. If other rules are already there, such as from WordPress or a caching plugin, they might conflict with each other. If you're forwarding the whole domain, remove the website from public_html or place the redirect right at the top of .htaccess (see Showing and editing hidden files such as .htaccess).
• The redirect disappears from the list. This happens if the rule in .htaccess gets overwritten, for example by WordPress or a plugin that rewrites the file. In that case, create the redirect again, or set it up in your website's own settings.
• Visitors see a "not secure" warning. A visitor going to https://yourdomain.com must first see a valid certificate before the redirect will work. So make sure you have a certificate even for a domain you only use for forwarding (see Requesting a free Let's Encrypt certificate).
• Just forwarding from www to without www? You don't need Site Redirects for that. Use Force redirect in the domain settings instead (see Domain settings: SSL, PHP, www and private_html).

Forwarding without a website

Do you have a domain purely for forwarding, which isn't part of a hosting package? Then you can set up the forwarding in My WebOké under Forwarders (see Can I also do this in My WebOké? Domains per package and Forwarders).