Redirect "http://old.net/category/postname" to "https://new.com/postname"?

Question

Apologies, for the very long title.

I'd really appreciate any help that anyone can offer with a situation I have currently before I go for the plugin option.

About a month ago I moved my site from:

http to https

I did the move myself and all went well.

Last night I decided to update the Permalink Structure from:

/category/postname/

to

/postname/

This switch went well and the site is running perfectly.

Now what I need to address is all the old URLs indexed in Google.

I have this .htaccess file on the .com version of my site:

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on 
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

And I'm wondering if there is a modification that could be made to the above to permanently redirect the indexed URLs to there corresponding post on the new blog.

Indexed URLs such as:

www.oldsite.net/category/postname

are returning a 404.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Since your new URLs do not have any category/ in them, you can redirect every URL that contains this and follows a pattern to your new permalink structure.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Change example.com to your new website's domain. You can also tweak with the 301 status if you wish.

Now, this

www.oldsite.net/category/postname

will be redirected to

www.newsite.com/postname

You can also add the entire URL to the rewrite rule, but since your new domain does not have /category/, It might be safe to redirect every link, unless you decide to create a post that its slug is category!

Answer 2

I think you need this htaccess rule to redirect any http to https :

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Changing the example.com to your domain, of course.