URL Rewrite Using .htaccess File (Removing Page Extensions)

Introduction

In one of my previous article I have explained how to rewrite your website URL in C#(.NET). Here I will show you a simple example of achieving this using the .htaccess file.

Behind The Scene

Very often you need to rewrite your website URL to make it search engine friendly. You may need to remove file extension from the pages.

Lets say you have a page named "services.aspx", If you look into the page then you might not get a proper idea what type of content your page is representing. Exactly the same way Search Engines also look in the pages and page names. So its very important to give a specific and user and/or SEO friendly URL names.

If we consider the above page then lets make it a bit user friendly by changing what it is representing actually. Lets change it to "seo-services-in-india.aspx", now you can see this name actually means something to users and/or Search Engines.

Another thing its a better to have pages with no extension, but you know its impossible to miss the file extension of a page (ie. .php, .html, .jsp, .aspx). So what you need you need to force the browser to render the "seo-services-in-india.aspx"  under the name of "seo-services-in-india".

In my previous article on URL Rewriting, we have achieved the same goal by giving the dummy page name according to our choice that does not depend on the real page name.

e.g we have rewritten a URL from "contact.aspx"  to "my-contect-details", where the page name actually changed from one to other programatically. But here we will not change it but we will remove the extension only.

 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
     RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
     RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.aspx [NC,L]
     RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]
     RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.jsp [NC,L]
 </IfModule>

Now put the above code into your .htaccess file, and this will remove all the .html extensions from all your pages automatically. and the pages can be rendered without a file extension of  ".html", ".aspx", ".php", ".jsp"

Happy Coding...