How to redirect Wordpress traffic with Nginx

by David Burgos

Recently I moved my Wordpress blog to Ghost, also changing to the current domain and I'm going to show how I redirected the Wordpress traffic with Nginx without losing SEO.

Keys

  • Keep working all URLs
  • Permanent redirects

My case

  • I have different domains, I moved from davidburgosonline.com to davidburgos.blog
  • My Wordpress URL config was:
/category/year/post-slug
  • and in Ghost is:
/post-slug

Keep in mind you must not change any Wordpress post's URL.

Redirect Wordpress traffic with Nginx

Edit your Nginx config file, usually in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

  • I added a server block
  • Listening port 80 at the previous domain olddomain.com
  • Your olddomain.com DNS should point to the newdomain.com server
  • For any location matching the Wordpress URL format, redirect to the new domain rewriting the slug.

Code example:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name olddomain.com;

    location / {
        rewrite "\w{2,}/\d{4}/(.*)__aSyNcId_<_imWuImYh__quot; https://newdomain.com/$1 permanent;
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ https://newdomain.com/$1 permanent;
    }
}
  • First rewrite redirects permanently any post, according to the post slug config.
  • Second rewrite redirects any URL to the new domain

One more thing

In case your Wordpress URL format is just /year/slug the rewrite line would be:

        rewrite "\d{4}/(.*)__aSyNcId_<_imWuImYh__quot; https://newdomain.com/$1 permanent;

Keep in mind is just a regular expression, so feel free to change it in order to fit your case.

Don't forget

You should restart Nginx to apply the changes

sudo service nginx restart

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