Question about setting up 301 redirect for the website I setup on Webflow

Publishing help Project settings
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Hey everyone,

I have a question about setting up redirects. It’s my first time setting this up so I apologise for being so clueless about a lot of things.

I redesigned a website which you can find at: www.overcomingptsd.com

How do I make it so that the old website which is www.overcomingptsd.info redirects to the new one?

Also, the blog page of the old website for some reason is set up on a subdomain which is at Overcoming PTSD - Blog and Resources

How do I set this up so that it redirects to the new blog page which is at:

Where do I start? What are the considerations that I need to take? And please, if you can, I would appreciate it if you would talk to me like I’m five cos I’m utterly clueless about back end set ups.

Here’s a Loom video of me verbalizing everything I mentioned above.

Here’s the spreadsheet mentioned in the Loom:

Cheers,
ELI

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Thanks again for jumping on here @Moheen .

Before I do this, should I add the domain overcomingptsd.info domain into webflow, in addition to the domain that we’ve already added, which is overcomgingptsd.com ?

(so two domains now, .info and .com, with the default set to .com. Is this understanding correct?)

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To connect the old domains / subdomains so that they redirect to the new website to specific pages, this requires connecting the domains / subdomains and setting up 301 redirect URLs.

For the main website www.overcomingptsd.info to be redirected, then what you can do is enter that domain into the project settings and then update the DNS so that it points to Webflow.

Connect the old domain to the new website on Webflow

  1. Go to project settings and hosting tab and enter the custom domain overcomingptsd.info
  2. This adds both the root domain as well as the www subdomain.
  3. At the domain DNS host dashboard, you can update DNS records so that the root domain redirects to Webflow and the www subdomain points to Webflow (see below for those records to update)
  4. In the Webflow project, ensure that in the settings, www.overcomingptsd.com (new website) is set as the default.
  5. Republish to www.overcomingptsd.com

The DNS settings for connecting a domain and www subdomain.

Please update the A records as follows. Note that some domain DNS providers require entering @ for the root domain, otherwise replace the @ below with the actual domain name.

Type: A
Hostname: @
Value: 75.2.70.75

Type: A
Hostname: @
Value: 99.83.190.102

Please update the CNAME www record as follows.

Type: CNAME
Hostname: www
Value: proxy-ssl.webflow.com.

After making DNS changes it can take several hours for this to propagate or take affect globally, if you would like us to check in the meantime please share a screenshot of your DNS records after updating.

Once DNS is resolving for the old domain, then it will redirect to the new website.

To setup a page redirect so that old /home goes to new home page of the website

This can be done in the hosting settings, in the 301 redirects section as shown in this screenshot - CleanShot 2021-09-10 at 19.02.11

Republish the project after making changes to page redirects.

Note that this will then always redirect any page on the website that is setup with the slug home , so do not create a page on your current website that has that slug.

Redirect old blog resources to new resources

If you are happy to redirect https://ptsdhelp.overcomingptsd.info/ to https://www.overcomingptsd.com then you can do this by including ptsdhelp.overcomingptsd.info as an additional custom subdomain on the same project.

Go to project settings and hosting tab and enter the custom subdomain ptsdhelp.overcomingptsd.info

  1. This adds that subdomain.
  2. At the domain DNS host dashboard, you can update DNS records so that the subdomain points to Webflow (see below for those records to update)
  3. Ensure that in the project settings, www.overcomingptsd.com is set as the default.
  4. Republish to www.overcomingptsd.com

Please update the CNAME ptsdhelp record as follows.

Type: CNAME
Hostname: ptsdhelp
Value: proxy-ssl.webflow.com.

After making DNS changes it can take several hours for this to propagate or take affect globally, if you would like us to check in the meantime please share a screenshot of your DNS records after updating.

Once DNS is resolving for the old subdomain, then it will redirect to the new website.

That way when someone visits https://ptsdhelp.overcomingptsd.info/ it will redirect to https://www.overcomingptsd.com/ and if they visit Overcoming PTSD - Blog and Resources it will redirect to https://www.overcomingptsd.com/resources.

Note that if someone visits a page that would’ve loaded on the old sites, if the equivalent URL does not exist on the new site then it will return a 404.

You might be able to setup some redirects in the 301 redirects section, however the redirects are based on the connected domains/ subdomains, so for example if the old blog subdomain, the old website domain, and the new website domain are all connected, they will all redirect to the same final path in the set redirects.

You can learn more about 301 redirects at https://university.webflow.com/lesson/set-301-redirects-to-maintain-seo-ranking.

You can learn more about connecting domains at https://university.webflow.com/lesson/connect-a-custom-domain.

Let me know any questions, or to check any settings after you have setup the connections.

1 Like
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Thank you so much for taking the time to explain all of these so clearly, @Moheen !! I appreciate this a lot! I will follow this and let you know how everything works out. Will let you know in the next few days!

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Hey, if my client is cancelling the old domain will the 301 redirects still work? Not likely, right?