How to Add Redirects

A redirect simply redirects a browser to another page of a site.

Use Cases

Redirects are often used for:

  1. Creating Friendly URL's. Creating custom URL's that are easy to remember. For example, //mydomain.com/summer might redirect users to //mydomain.com/2017-08_summer-deals. The longer URL is the actual page URL within the system because there might be an older 2016 page, a 2015 page, etc. By only updating the /summer redirect each year customers will always know that it goes to the proper page.
     
  2. Renaming pages. When you rename a page Marketpath CMS automatically creates a redirect for the old page URL to the new page URL. We do this to avoid dead links on your site but you can always delete the added redirect.
     
  3. Redirecting Old Site URL's. When you build a new website your page names often change. /about-us might become /about. So you would want to create a redirect from the old to the new.
     
  4. Dynamic Handling. It may be desirable to create a dynamic redirect based on a regular expression where many variations of a URL can be caught and sent elsewhere (even to an external custom handler). For example, if you added //mydomain.com/\d{4}$ as your regex pattern then you would catch all URL's for "mydomain.com" that ended with 4 numbers, like //mydomain.com/2022.

Field Reference

Use Regex If checked, the redirect lookup will check the URL against the given regex pattern. If there's a match, the redirect will occur. See More About Regular Expressions below.
Origin The URL you want directed elsewhere. This must be in the form:

//DOMAIN/PATH

Both the domain and path values are required. If Use Regex is checked then the path should contain a regular expression pattern.
Destination Where you want the visitor to end up. This can be a custom URL, a page, a document, or an image.
Is Permanent Checking this will instruct browsers to cache the redirect result and skip contacting the web server. We recommend that you test a redirect before you check Is Permanent. Once the redirect works as expected, then check Is Permanent and republish.
Notes Used for keeping internal notes about redirects.
Domain Apply the redirect to one domain or to all domains on the site.
Priority High-priority redirects are checked before lower-priority ones.

Regular Expressions

Regular expressions in Marketpath CMS utilize .Net Regular Expressions. The goal is to capture patterns of characters and redirect the user to an alternate page or a different website altogether. Regular expressions can be used for the domain or the path or both. The example Origin below will redirect all domains for a given site that have a path starting with "how-to".

//[^/]*/how-to/.*

This might be useful if you move all pages to a new URL structure.

Regex Groups

You can also take advantage of regular expression groups, capture the results, and use those results in your Destination. Let's take the example above and add groupings:

//([^/]*)/how-to/(.*)

This regex pattern captures two groups - the domain, "([^/]*)", and the path after /how-to/, "(.*)". We can setup our Destination to include the captured values from those two groups:

https://somecustomapp.com/dosomething?domain=$1&page=$2

$1 refers to the first captured group (the domain) and $2 refers to the second captured group (the path after /how-to/). 

Query parameters

A redirect still matches when the current URL has extra query parameters beyond those on the origin. Extra query parameters are passed through to the destination, except:

  • Parameters that were matched on the origin (for a regular, non-regex redirect)
  • Parameters that are already present on the destination URL