From your Bluehost Dashboard select eh ‘Domains‘->’Redirects‘ options form the left hand menu once logged in. From here you can do several kinds of redirects like,
- Redirect all traffic from one existing domain name to another (eg .org -> .com)
- Redirect specific domain names or URL’s
- and has other options for redirects as well.
Table of Contents:
Bluehost Redirect Options
In Bluehost you can do these kinds of redirects below. If you don’t see what you want on the list then scroll down to the next section where there are other methods described to do other redirects.
First, go to your Bluehost Dashboard and login. Then, in the left hand menu, go to ‘Domains’ -> ‘Redirects’ and select ‘Add New’. A screen will appear with the options you can choose from as per below.
Redirect an entire (all traffic) website to another (eg, .org -> .com)
NOTE: You can make this either a permanent (301) or temporary (302) redirect
The first box lets you select which domain name on your Bluehost account you want to redirect FROM. Select the appropriate site.
PROTIP: If you haven’t allowed the URL to be managed from your Bluehost Account yet then you can allow it to be managed by Bluehost by changing the Nameservers for the domain.
The go ahead and select the ‘target domain’ to be redirected TO. You can select any site that you want. For example you might want to redirect from the .org variation of your URL to the .com version as an example. If you are redirecting all traffic from one site to another then you don’t have to enter anything in the ‘directory’ field – leave it blank in this case.
You can also select if this is a permanent (301) of temporary (302) change by selecting 301 or 302 from the form. These are important for SEO purposes as it lets Search Engines (like Google) understand what to do with the URLs being redirected which is important for them determining which URLs to show.
In addition you can select if there needs to be traffic, for the same domain name but the ‘www version’ redirected also. I would suggest in most cases this should be ticked.
PROTIP: If you aren’t aware then there are technically different version of your site which people can use. The ‘www’ and the ‘non www’. All are able to be accessed by the user and so redirects often need to handle this type of scenario.
Redirect a specific page (or file directory) to another site
NOTE: You can make this either a permanent (301) or temporary (302) redirect.
If you want to redirect a specific page on a website managed from your Bluehost account then you can also do that by selecting the domain name, then the particular path (or file directory) and then also adding the ‘target site’.
You will also have the option of making this redirect permanent (301) or temporary (302) which is important for SEO reasons. See above section for further SEO description.
Redirect a a page on one domain name to the same page on another domain name
NOTE: You can make this either a permanent (301) or temporary (302) redirect.
If you want to redirect a page like this, yoursite.com/about/ -> anothersite.org/about/ then you can also use this same Bluehost form. This is particularly useful if you are migrating a site from one domain name to another and the page structure is remaining the same for this page but the ‘base’ domain name is the only thing changing.
How to do other kinds of redirects
Bluehost Redirect area doesn’t handle all redirect scenarios and as such there are a few other options you might like to look at about redirects.
http -> https redirect
In addition to their being both a ‘www’ and a ‘non-www’ version of your site there is also an http or https version of your site assuming you have (and you should) an SSL certificate. This is what allows the https version.
PROTIP: On Bluehost this will be created automatically for you when you assign a website to Bluehost.
You can create this kind of redirect in two different ways. If in WordPress you can install a plugin which will do so automatically for you. If you want to add the code your self then you can add, to your .htaccess file, you can do that also.
Automatically create redirects on change of URL in WordPress site
A really useful plugin to have is an ‘Auto redirect‘ plugin which automatically creates redirects for you everytime you change a page or post URL within your WordPress CMS. It also has some of the functionality of Bluehost Redirect Dashboard as well so you can get away with just this one plugin for much of it.
