Ask Why can’t I get all the pages of the old website onto the new domain upon domain redirection?

[Brajet]

Hey all!

I recently built a new website on a new domain. We're trying to keep and redirecting the old domain to the new site, with the old site on bluehost. I've gone through their steps to set up a redirect, but unfortunately, it only redirects the homepage. I'd like all pages on the old website, like example.com/contact to redirect to the new website homepage.

Any idea how to do this through bluehost? Their customer service team has been no help and just keeps telling me I need to clear my cache, but I've done that multiple times over a two week span. It's clearly not the answer. TIA!

 

[Anthony Joshua]

This usually happens when only a basic redirect was set up in Bluehost. Their default redirect tool often just sends traffic from the main domain and doesn't handle subpages. You'll need to edit the .htaccess file manually in your old site's root folder. Add a wildcard redirect rule like RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*)$ https://newdomain.com/. That will catch every page from the old domain and push it to your new homepage automatically.

 

[Brajet]

Each page on your old site has its own address, and if you don't set up a redirect for each one, visitors might end up on a broken page or just land on your homepage. Plus, your new site might be set up differently, so copying everything exactly isn't always easy. Basically, a domain redirect just guides traffic, it doesn't transfer content. To get all your old pages on the new site, you gotta actually move the content and set up individual redirects

 

[Felix😎]

The issue might happen because each page from the old domain needs its own specific redirection. If you only redirect the main domain, individual pages might not carry over unless you've mapped every old page to a new one. Also, if certain pages on the old domain don't exist anymore or don't match pages on the new site, they won't redirect. Fixing this requires setting up proper page-to-page redirects.