Wordpress .htaccess www redirect fail

Question

I've just been asked to help administer a charities WordPress site. It's using http and I'd like to modify the .htaccess redirect to www. The .htaccess file looks bog standard, with the addition of a 404 at the start:

ErrorDocument 404 /error.php
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

I've tried a couple of times to add the www redirect code but it keeps failing every time:

ErrorDocument 404 /error.php
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^l-a-m.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.l-a-m.org/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

I've also tried moving the redirect block out of the # WordPress code and putting it at the start of the file, but this doesn't work either.

I'm a complete newbie to WordPress so can anyone help and tell me where I'm going wrong please?

Answer 1

Answer by Shim-Sao in his comments ... modifying the .htaccess file didn't work, so I edited the wp-config.php and added the following lines which worked:

define('WP_HOME','http://www.l-a-m.org');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://www.l-a-m.org');

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

Answer 2

Try replacing:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^l-a-m.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.l-a-m.org/$1 [L,R=301]

with:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

You also mentioned previous attempts "keep failing". Could you tell us what is going wrong, since it may be something that will also cause the approach above to fail.

Answer 3

You can try :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [QSA,L,R=301]

or to force https :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://www.example.com/$1 [QSA,L,R=301]

Replace example.com by the host you want.

EDIT IMPORTANT :

In WordPress, don't use .htaccess, use wp-config.php and adapt the 2 lines with the right host name :

define('WP_HOME','http://www.domainname.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://www.domainname.com');