What is a URL redirect?

If you are ever making a new website or redesigning an old one you most certainly will need to know a way of redirecting URLs.

A URL – Uniform Resource Locator – is basically the website address. It is the thing everybody sees at the top middle of every Web Broswer. Without URLs you would not have the internet. URLs allow websites to connect!

Since the url is extremely important for websites, it can be very inconvenient for your website users if you do not know how to redirect one URL to another URL.

Easiest way to redirect URL

Thankfully, there is an extremely fast and easy way to implement a URL redirect.

The fastest and easiest way to redirect any webpage / website, is to place a redirect script into the place where you need to redirect from. Surprisingly you do not need to have access to the place you are redirecting to, but you do need to have access to the place where you are redirecting from.

The two main ways to access the place where you are directing from is to log into your web hosting platform online via their website or using free FTP software like Filezilla.

Once you are looking at your web hosting directory, you need to navigate to the folder where the old URL is. If it is the whole website, then the root (base) directory is where you want to be.

The trick is to place a .html file (with redirect script) in that folder and remove the old files (download to your computer before deleting if you want to keep your website files).

Making the .html file

The fastest and easiest way of making the .html file is to open up a blank Notepad / Notepad ++ document.

Paste in the following script (change | to < & >):

|head|
|meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; url=http://www.newwebsite.com”|
|/head|
|body|
|/body|

Change www.newwebsite.com to the new website.

And save your file as index.html

Upload your new index.html file to the directory folder and make sure the filename is exactly index.html

If it is not, rename it.

Once that is done, when you navigate to the old URL in a Web Browser – you should be automatically redirected to the new website!