How do I do a 301 redirect of specific pages with a catchall for any pages not specified?

Question

We are changing domains and need to redirect old pages to new, and then create a catch-all to redirect any that we missed.

This needs to be done as a 301 redirect using .htaccess.

For example:

1. Redirect http://www.olddomain.com/page1 to https://www.newdomain.com/page1.
2. Redirect page2 the same way.
3. Redirect all other pages on oldomain.com to the home page of the new domain.

Answer 1

You basically just need to perform the redirects in the order you've stated: 1, 2 and 3.

Assuming newdomain.com and olddomain.com point to different servers then you can use mod_alias:

Redirect 302 /page1 https://www.newdomain.com/page1
Redirect 302 /page2 https://www.newdomain.com/page2

# Redirect everything else to the home page
RedirectMatch 302 ^ https://www.newdomain.com/

However, redirecting to the home page is rarely a good user experience (and Google likely treats it as a soft-404 anyway). You could simply redirect /<other-url> to newdomain.com/<other-url> and allow the new site to handle it as a meaningful 404 - generally a better experience for users.

Note that Redirect is prefix-matching. Everything after the matched URL (eg. /page1) is appended onto the end of the target URL. If the old and new URLs are the same then you only need a single Redirect directive to redirect everything:

Redirect 302 / https://www.newdomain.com/

Note that these are obviously 302 (temporary) redirects. Change to a 301 (permanent) redirect only when you are sure it's working OK. 301s are cached hard by the browser, so you don't want incorrect redirects cached by the client.

---

If olddomain.com and newdomain.com are physically hosted on the same filesystem then you'll need to use mod_rewrite instead since you'll need to check the host header for the domain being accessed. For example:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} olddomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^page1$ https://www.newdomain.com/page1 [R=302,L]

Obviously, it would be far more efficient if olddomain.com and newdomain.com point to different places.