How to redirect only the Home Page of a Wordpress Site

Question

I would like to know how to redirect ONLY the Home Page of a Wordpress site to another domain.

Read a few other posts on this but none of them work.

This is what I've tried in my .htaccess :

 RedirectMatch ^/$ http://newsite.com

However ALL the pages on my site are being redirected to the new site.

Anyone have any ideas on what else to try?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Your URL will never reach / it is always redirected to the domain without the trailing slash. While PHP will interpret the root of the domain as / , the REQUEST_URI from Apache is actually looking for an empty string. This can be written as ^$ :

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$  http://newsite.com [L]
</IfModule>

Answer 2

Just place this rule as very first rule in your WP .htaccess file:

%{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/+[\s?#]
RewriteRule ^$ http://newsite.com [L,R=301]