cPanel 301 Redirect with Bluehost

Bluehost is a famous Linux PHP hosting service provider with a lot of useful hosting features, including the easy 301 redirection which we are going to discuss in this article.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which is not only SEO friendly, but also more user friendly when compared to a 302 redirect. A permanent redirect will notify the visitor’s browser and search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, to update any bookmarks that are linked to the page that is being redirected.

To redirect a PHP website from one domain to another, from an URL to another or from one file to another, you may think about 301 redirection via the .htaccess file, but we will introduce you an easier way for that. It does not work with Bluehost, you can actually follow this guide to redirect your websites that are hosted on most cPanel managed web servers.

Setup cPanel 301 Redirect with Bluehost

1. Login to your Bluehost cPanel account.

2. Click the Redirects icon, in the Domains section of the cPanel.

3. Tick the Permanent (301) option.

4. 301 Redirect from Domain or URL

Input your domain which you like to redirect. If it is a subfolder, enter its folder name in the field after the main domain name.

5. 301 Redirect to Domain or URL

There is a redirect to field just below the source domain or URL, you need to enter the full target domain or URL here. Note that the destination domain or URL can start with different protocols, e.g. http://, https:// or ftp://

6. Select 301 Redirect options

“Only redirect with www.”

This option will only redirect visitors that use www. as part of the URL.

“Redirect with or without www.”

This option will redirect all visitors.

“Do Not Redirect www.”

This option will not redirect visitors that use www. as part of the URL

Wild Card Redirect

Wild Card Redirect box will redirect all files within a directory to the same filename in the redirected directory. You cannot use a Wild Card Redirect to redirect your main domain to a different directory on your site.

7. Finish the Redirection

Click Add this redirect to finalize the 301 redirect setup.

WordPress URL redirects

If your website is based on WordPress, you have more flexible ways to set up 301 redirect for WordPress sites. WordPress redirects plugin is easier to use. Some WordPress redirects plugins offer many useful extra features you may like. For example, redirection groups provide us a useful way to organize redirects for large websites, 404 errors monitor, redirects click count, URL redirects batch process, URL redirects bulk import and export, etc.

Update May 2018: this article was originally published in 2014 and has since been updated. In this update, we added the new method to create URL redirects for WordPress websites.