Cannot create 301 redirects where the old path contains a colon ':'

Design help CMS
1

Hello!

I’m redesigning a website for a client and having some trouble adding redirects from their old site. The old paths contain a colon. Example - /whitepaper/sfdr-blog-series:-what-is-the-difference-between-an-article-8-and-article-9-fund

As a result, Webflow if blocking the redirect as it contains invalid characters. Is there a way around this?

Thanks in advance.

2

i feel ur pain
dealing with redirects in webflow ca be a bit tricky
especially when you have special characters in ur old paths like colons. webflow tends to be picky about that, you know. one workaround you can try is to use a 301 or 302 http status code in your redirects. you might need to create custom redirects in ur hosting provider’s control panel or .ntaccess file if you have access to it. basically, you’d set uo a server-level redirect instead of relying solely on webflow for these special cases. also, check ur old paths in the redirects to make sure there are no typos or trailing or leading spaces.
hope that helps
actually i’m just signed up here, so i’ll be happy if you’ll resolve this with my suggestions :grinning:

3

Hi Julia!

I found a solution. Apparently, Webflow accepts regex/wildcards, so you can substitute an invalid character with (.*)

By changing the domain from:

/whitepaper/sfdr-blog-series:-what-is-the-difference-between-an-article-8-and-article-9-fund

to

/whitepaper/sfdr-blog-series(.*)-what-is-the-difference-between-an-article-8-and-article-9-fund

webflow redirects any URL with any character in that place. In my case :

So yeah, that’s a solution :+1:

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