It’s been a long time since we shared a tool we were impressed by. We used to share, many years ago, that we were using the Lipsum Lorem Ipsum text generator, or a base 64 convertor for hashing passwords.
But in recent years there’s been less to share, until today.
We’ve recently been working on a migration for a large, established website that, despite being around for many years and building up over 8,000 pages, has had to be decommissioned due to a corporate restructuring. Despite being on WordPress for many years, the company decided to build all new entities on Webflow. And so now, many thousands of pages are being distributed amongst, get this… FIVE other websites!
In order to handle this, we had to create an .htaccess file for Apache server that handled the distribution of thousands of URLs amongst their new homes.
When asked about whether our complex .htaccess file would work, and if we could test it, the answer was… search for a tool. And so we found Made With Love’s .htaccess Tester.
So we had the client’s epic spreadsheet of redirects, from each URL scraped by Screaming Frog SEO Spider, in the single origin and all the destination websites, and selected various source URLs to be pasted into the ,htaccess tester. I’m glad I did because, even though they were redirecting correctly, there was an issue that stood out purely from testing; the client had listed all the URLs we supplied but without the https://www.[TLD] – they’d somehow removed the WWW so that their list was chock full of https://[TLD] paths.
We very quickly manually edited all the destination paths in the .htaccess file and sent the final product to the client.
Now, whilst the redirects actually worked, by sending traffic to a site via one redirect, then getting another at the other end introduces one too many hops for our liking. It’s so much easier and more efficient that traffic goes direct to the correct URL rather than be redirecting yet again. Lag may be small but on the Internet, every little helps.
So thank you to Screaming Frog for the spider that ignores the robots.txt directive on sites that don’t want to be indexed just yet, and thank you to Made With Love for the awesome little .htaccess tester. Brilliant.
And if you need help with migration, redirection, .htaccess files or crawling websites for SEO and digital marketing audits, do call us on 01252 692 765 or leave us a message.
