How to change URL in address bar

Question

I have static html files and I want to be able to remove the .html file extension at the end of the url inside the address bar.

So instead of /contact-us.html - I want it to display as this /?contact-us

One thing to notice here is there is a question mark before the page name(s). I want to do this to any html page not just contact-us.html . How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

You can rewite the single page in your .htaccess using this:

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteRule    ^/contact-us.html$    /?contact-us    [NC,L] 

More specifically, if you want to rewrite all .html extensions you can use a regular expression to match a pattern of pages:

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteRule ^(.*)(.html)$    /?$1    [NC,L] 

In the above example, it will match any .html extension. eg /example-page.html will be /?example-page

You can test it out at an htaccess tester here: http://htaccess.mwl.be/

However , question mark (?) is reserved for query strings, and your rewrites may end up in an infinite loop because the rule will rewrite http://www.example.com/example-page.html to http://www.example.com/?example-page , which the server will resolve to http://www.example.com/index.html?example-page , which in turn triggers another re-write, ad infinitum.

A better approach would be to mock a directory structure, and re-write /example-page.html to /example-page/ This gives you some SEO benefits as well, and can be done with this .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteRule ^(.*)(.html)$    /?$1/    [NC,L]

Answer 2

If you want to be able to use folder path instead of .html you need these rules.

This allows you to use http://domain.com/contact-us in the address bar.

  Options -MultiViews
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /+(.+)\.html [NC]
  RewriteRule ^ %1 [R=302,L] 

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
  RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ $1.html [L]

Answer 3

Add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]