Cannot get 301 redirection in htaccess to work (either Redirect or Rewrite)

Question

I have recently changed how posts are categorized and changed the permalinks not to show the category. Consequently, I need to redirect the old URLs. I have tried many variations of the following but nothing seems to work:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^postname http://www.example.com/postname [R=301,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

I have also tried the following:

• instead of RewriteRule, used Redirect 301 ...
• used the full URL for the original (instead of the Regex '^')
• I have moved the redirection statement in different places i.e. inside the # BEGIN WordPress, as well as place it after the IfModule, RewriteEnging On, etc.
• I have also tried both RewriteRule and Redirect at the end of the file after # END WordPress

I have been using Chrome Incognito to test after each change to avoid the caching issues. I actually have about 40 posts that I would have to redirect to not use their old categories/sub-categories in the URL. I read somewhere that the wordpress code will redirect/rewrite to index.php so that the internal Wordpress permalinks would work but I am unsure how this interacts with the redirects that I wish to include.

I am not sure what I am missing. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

The ^ in your rewriterule means the URL must begin with the postname, as in your new structure - so what you're saying in that second line is, "redirect http://www.example.com/postname to http://www.example.com/postname".

So it's the ^ that's throwing things off.

If you were previously using URLs like http://www.example.com/categoryname/postname/ then I would suggest instead:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^categoryname/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^categoryname2/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^categoryname3/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,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

Just add a RewriteRule on its own line for every category. The "$" tells the server to save everything that comes after the category name (i.e. your post slug) and redirect to example.com/that-particular-slug.