Designoir // How to redirect your domain name to another website

How to redirect your domain name to another website

Have you ever wondered how to redirect one domain name (your website address) to another website? This quick tutorial will show you how in layman’s terms. You’d be surprised how many people have asked me how to get their old domain name to automatically redirect to their new one, or to have five or so different domains point to the one website.

For example, let’s say you own the following domains:

www.domain.com , www.domain.com.au , www.domain.net

Obviously you’re not going to want to manage three of the exact same website, for so many reasons it’s not funny;

1) You’re paying for extra hosting that you don’t actually need
2) Your search engine optimisation will be split among three different websites - good luck getting results!
3) Your visitors are being forced to download and cache the same information repetitively.

Just to name a few!

What needs to happen in this situation, is a domain name redirection. It’s very simple to do, and will save you money and time, and will even help your search engine results as well as being “web-friendly”.

Here’s what you do:

1) Open any text/html editor and create a new document.
2) Save this document anywhere on your hard drive and name it “index.html” without the quotes.
3) Copy the following code into the document:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.your-domain-name-here.com" />
    <title>TITLE OF SITE HERE</title>
</head>

</html>

4) Edit the “http://www.your-domain-name-here.com” to the full domain of the site you want to redirect to.
5) Edit the title of the webpage - this is not so important, as it will only be seen for a fraction of a second before the redirection takes place, but it’s always best to do a little extra anyway.
6) Using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or your web control panel, upload this file to each domain you want to redirect from.

That’s it!

To make it even easier for you, I’ve already created said file as a template, and made it available for download here:

Download Redirection Template (4KB)

Simply unzip the file and edit as described in steps 4 and 5, then upload it to each site you want to redirect from.

PS - I know this is very simple for most people with even the most basic knowledge of web design - but as I said, one would be surprised as to how many people have asked me how to do this!