Is there a proper order for processing 301 redirects and URL re-writes?

Question

Okay, the situation is like this. I have example.com/old-url.php , as one example, which I eventually want to become example.com/new-url/ .

Since I am doing this for multiple pages across the website, I first remove the PHP extension and force trailing slashes for all requests, like so:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /[^?\s]+\.php
RewriteRule (.*)\.php$ /$1/ [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(.+)/$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1.php [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule .*[^/]$ $0/ [L,R=301]

For some pages, that is all that is required. For other pages, such as my example above, I will need to take one more step. So I rename old-url.php to new-url.php and create an additional 301 redirect, like so:

Redirect 301 /old-url/ http://www.example.com/new-url/

But is this the proper way to do it? Would it be better practice to do something like:

Redirect 301 old-url.php http://www.example.com/new-url.php

And simply place the 301's before the URL re-writes? Or even:

Redirect 301 old-url.php http://www.example.com/new-url/

It seems like there are several ways I could set this up, and I was just wondering if it really matters or which is optimal.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

One should keep external redirects before internal routing rules. Also not a good idea to mix mod_rewrite rules with mod_alias rules.

This is proper order:

RewriteRule ^old-url/?$ /new-url/ [L,NC,R=301]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /[^?\s]+\.php
RewriteRule ^(.+?)\.php$ /$1/ [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule .*[^/]$ $0/ [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(.+)/$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1.php [L]