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You can redirect (forward) a page on your website to another page, either on your own site or elsewhere on the Internet.

For example, if your domain name is “example.com” and someone types “www.example.com” in a web browser, you can redirect that to a completely different address, such as http://www.example.org/.

On this page:

• Using our control panel
• Adding multiple redirects
• 301 "permanent" vs. 302 "temporary" redirection
• Masked redirection

Using our control panel

You can use our control panel to redirect one URL to another:

1. Login to the “My Account” control panel (having trouble?)
2. Click Redirections
3. Click Add New Redirect

You’ll be able to choose from several different options, including:

• Redirect non-SSL requests to SSL
• Redirect to or from “www”
• Redirect requests for certain pages
• Redirect one alias hostname to another
• Redirect all requests

Adding multiple redirects

If you need to create multiple separate redirects, simply add as many redirections as you need in our control panel.

301 "permanent" vs. 302 "temporary" redirection

You’ll have the choice of a “301 permanent” or “302 temporary” redirect.

A “302 temporary” redirect tells search engines that this redirect might not always happen in the future, and that they should keep checking the original page URL. This is the safest choice.

If you’re going to permanently stop using the old URL, and you want to make sure that search engines only “know about” the new site, you can use a “301 permanent” redirect instead. That tells the visitor to always use the new URL in the future, which may mean updating browser bookmarks or changing search engine listings

As a general rule of thumb:

• Use a “301 permanent” redirect if you're trying to stop people from visiting the original URL and you want search engines to completely "forget about" it.
• Use a “302 temporary” redirect if you might want visitors to use the original URL in the future, or if you want search engines to continue indexing the original URL.

Masked redirection

With normal 301 or 302 redirection described above, the website address in the visitor's Web browser will change to display the new address.

Another option that was popular in the past was “masked” redirection, which relied on a quirky feature of old HTML versions (“framesets”) that is no longer widely supported. It produces warnings and errors (including security warnings) in modern web browsers, because it’s considered bad practice to hide the true destination of pages for security reasons. Framesets had other drawbacks, too.

Because of that, you should choose normal 301 or 302 redirection, even though it means the address bar changes. If you still want to avoid the address bar changing, you should set up service for the other domain name properly as an alias or Add On Hosting.