301 Redirect "/" (home) to external page

Hi! I’d like to redirect ONLY the home page of a site to an external page, however the 301 redirects area won’t let me simply add a “/”. Is there a way to do a 301 for this? Thanks for your help!

Well this is really a unique edge case. Why would you want to do this?

Since you can’t rewrite the home page, the only way is redirecting via a meta refresh tag or JavaScript. However this is not the same as a 301 redirect SEO-wise.

Thanks for your answer @samliew ! We need to do this because our external page is a WebApp that replaces the current homepage but we still need all the ancillary pages (support, feature explanations, etc).

I already redirected via javascript but absolutely agree with you that it’s not the same (both SEO and user experience).

Any trick on the hosting side which you think I can implement?

Since you can’t do this with Webflow, perhaps consider self-hosting so you can only redirect the home page?

For future people encountering this, in your 301 redirects, you can set your from URL to /* to redirect the homepage only.

@memetican, this is not possible anymore …

Can you help me? I read your page but I don’t understand it.
my website is www.bactiol.eu, the old URL for the dutch home page was www.bactiol.eu/nl

Now I need the www.bactiol.eu/nl to redirect to the www.bactiol.eu
So I did what you said and this error pops-up:

Hi Michiel,

For what you’re doing, just redirect /nl to /

the solution in this thread is for redirecting the homepage itself, which is a different problem from what you’re facing.