How to set a website redirection

What is a redirect?

A redirect is an automatic forwarding of a user from one page to another. The Site Redirection allows you to redirect your site visitors to another website or to a specific page on your site.

When do I need to set Site Redirection?

Let’s say you have deleted a website page and you do not want your visitors to see an error when they visit this page. The site redirection can help you with this. You can simply configure forwarding from a deleted page to your website’s main page. Also, your site architecture might someday be rebuilt, and the links of the important pages might be changed. For example, you might move your forum page from yourdomain.com/forum address to a new forum.example.com address. That’s when the site redirection is needed too if you want all your customers to be up to date with the latest changes. Also, this will help you to save the SEO value of moved pages. And there might be a lot of such examples.

How to set the site redirection?

The process of configuring your site redirection depends on the panel you use.

DirectAdmin

1. Go to your client area to the “Services – My Services” section and click the “Open Direct Admin” button;
2. The Direct Admin panel will be opened. Go to the “Account Manager” section and click the “Site Redirection” button;
3. Choose a domain you want to set the redirection for in the top menu bar;
4. Click the “Create New Redirect” button and specify the following information:
   • Local URL Path — your site page you want to redirect your visitors from:
     • you can only leave a slash (/) to redirect your visitors from ALL the pages of this domain somewhere else.
       • Warning: all the subdomains of this domain will be redirected too, as they are located in your domain subfolder. Therefore, we do not recommend you to set the general redirection if you have subdomains;
     • you can type your site section (items/) in this field to redirect your visitors from all the pages of this specific section to somewhere else;
     • you can type a specific page of your site (items/flower.php) in this field to redirect your visitors from this specific page to somewhere else;
   • Redirect Type:
     • 301 is recommended if the old page is no longer available and all the content has been moved to a new page permanently. The SEO value of the old page is transferred to a new page;
     • 302 is recommended if the old page will someday be available again and the new page is a temporary measure (when the old page is under reconstruction, for example). The SEO value of the old page remains on the old page;
     • 303 is also a temporary redirection, like 302, but it cannot be cached. It is recommended when a request to a URL should be done using the GET method. The SEO value of the old page remains on the old page;
   • Destination URL — a new page your visitors will be redirected to;
5. Once all the information is specified, click the “Create” button.

If you want to delete some redirection rule, hit the checkbox near the needed rule and click the “Delete button”.

Please note that all the redirection rules created within this area will also be written down at the end of your .htaccess file. If you want to edit any rule, you can simply find the .htaccess file of the needed domain through your “File Manage”r and make the necessary changes.

cPanel

1. Go to your client area to the “Services – My Services” section and click the “Open cPanel” button;
2. The cPanel will be opened. Go to the “Domains” section and click the “Redirects” button;
3. Choose the type of redirect you would like to use for your domain:
   • Permanent (301) – this redirect will update the visitors’ bookmarks and direct search engines to the new site;
   • Temporary (302) – it will redirect the visitor or search engine, but will not update the bookmark and the search engine will continue to index to the original page;
4. From the drop-down menu “https?://(www.)?”, choose the domain name you would like to redirect;
5. If you want to redirect a single page or directory, you can use the text field following the drop-down menu and enter the name of the folder or file;
6. Enter the full URL of the page your domain will be redirected to in the “Redirects to” field;
7. Select one of the following settings in the “www. redirection:” section:
   • Only redirect with www. – the redirect will work if only visitors are using www. as a part of the URL;
   • Redirect with or without www. – the redirect will work regardless of using www. as a part of the URL or not;
   • Do Not Redirect www. – the redirect will not work if visitors are using www. as a part of the URL;
8. Check “Wild Card Redirect” if you would like all files in the current directory to be redirected to the same files names in the new directory;
9. Finally, click the “Add” button and the redirect will be created.

If you have existing web redirects set up in cPanel, you can also see and delete them from the section “Current Redirects”.

Please note that all the redirection rules created within this area will also be written down at the end of your .htaccess file. If you want to edit any rule, you can simply find the .htaccess file of the needed domain through your “File Manager” and make the necessary changes.

ISPmanager

1. Go to your client area to the “Services – My Services” section and click the “Open ISPmanager” button;
2. You can add a redirect by going to the section “WWW – WWW-domains”;
3. Select a domain you want to redirect from and click the “Redirects” button;
4. In the next window, click the “Create” button;
5. Select a “Code”:
   • 301 Moved Permanently — the requested page has been permanently moved to a new URL;
   • 302 Found —  the requested page has been temporarily moved to a different URL;
   • 303 See Other — the requested page can be found at another URL by using the GET HTTP method;
6. Enter the “Path” of the page from which you want to redirect visitors. The path must begin with “/”;
7. In the “URL” field, enter the address of the page you want to redirect to. The external URL must begin with “http://” or “https://”;
8. After making the changes, click the “Ok” button.

In the “Redirects” section, you can edit or delete the redirects you created earlier.

Plesk

We want to clarify that through the control panel Plesk redirection can be set only when adding a domain.

1. Go to your client area to the “Services – My Services” section and click the “Open Plesk” button;
2. The Plesk panel will be opened. Go to the “Websites & Domains” section and click the button ”Add Domain”;
3. In the “Domain name” box, type the domain name and from which you want to redirect visitors;
4. Under “Hosting type”, select the “Forwarding” option.;
5. In the “Destination address” box, type the URL address to which you want to redirect visitors;
6. Under “Forwarding type” select:
   • Moved permanently (code 301) — use this redirection type if you want to keep search engine rankings of your site after moving it permanently to another address;
   • Moved temporarily (code 302) — use this redirection type when the destination domain is used temporarily, for example, when you are testing a new version of your site with real visitors while keeping the old version intact. If you set this redirection for a newly created destination domain, this domain will not be indexed by search engines;
   • Frame forwarding — when visitors are redirected to another site, the address bar of their browsers continues to show the source URL. Thus, visitors remain unaware of the redirection. This is called frame forwarding as the index page of the source site contains a frame with the destination site;
7. After making the changes, click the “OK” button.