Full domain .htaccess 301 keeping same paths, but also redirect some URLs to different paths

Question

I believe the following code will redirect my old domain to my new domain keeping the same URL paths.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.newdomain\.co.uk 
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.newdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

However, I also have some URLS from my old site that don't exist on my new site, so they would return a 404 with the rule above.

How do I redirect these to an alternative URL path?

Answer 1

You simply need to redirect these specific URLs before your catch-all redirect above. For example:

RewriteRule ^old-url-does-not-exist$ /new-url-that-does-exist [R=301,L]

Just to note... in .htaccess there is no slash prefix on the source URL pattern, ie. the regex ^old-url-does-not-exist$ matches the URL /old-url-does-not-exist. Whereas there is a slash prefix on the destination URL. That's just RewriteRule syntax.