I recently wanted to remove the extensions from my website, in order to make the URLs more user and search engine friendly. I stumbled across tutorials on how to remove the .php extension from a PHP page. What about the .html ? I wanted to remove those as well! In this tutorial I’ll show you how to do that easily, by editing the .htaccess file.

What is an .htaccess file

An .htaccess file is a simple ASCII file that you create with a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit. The file lets the server know what configuration changes to make on a per-directory basis.

Please note that .htaccess is the full name of the file. It isn’t file.htaccess , it’s simply .htaccess .

.htaccess files affect the directory in which they are placed in and all children (sub-directories). For example if there is one .htaccess file located in your root directory of yoursite.com , it would affect yoursite.com/content/ , yoursite.com/content/images/ , and so on…

It is important to remember that this can be bypassed. If you don’t want certain .htaccess commands to affect a specific directory, place a new .htaccess file within the directory you don’t want to be affected with the changes, and remove the specific command(s) from the new file.

Features

With an .htaccess file you can:

Redirect the user to different page

Password protect a specific directory

Block users by IP

Preventing hot-linking of your images

Rewrite URLs

Specify your own Error Documents

In this tutorial we’ll be focusing only on rewriting URLs.

Removing Extensions

To remove the .php extension from a PHP file for example yoursite.com/wallpaper.php to yoursite.com/wallpaper you have to add the following code inside the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

If you want to remove the .html extension from a html file for example yoursite.com/wallpaper.html to yoursite.com/wallpaper you simply have to change the last line from the code above, to match the filename:

RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]

That’s it! You can now link pages inside the HTML document without needing to add the extension of the page. For example:

<a href="http://whatever.com/wallpaper" title="wallpaper">wallpaper</a>

Adding a trailing slash at the end

I received many requests asking how to add a trailing slash at the end, for example: yoursite.com/page/

Ignore the first snippet and insert the code below. The first four lines deal with the removal of the extension and the following, with the addition of the trailing slash and redirecting.

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ $1.php RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /$1/$2.php RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$ RewriteRule (.*)$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

Link to the HTML or PHP file the same way as shown above. Don’t forget to change the code if you want it applied to an HTML file instead of PHP.

Some people asked how you can remove the extension from both HTML and PHP files. I don’t have a solution for that. But, you could just change the extension of your HTML file from .html or .htm to .php and add the code for removing the .php extension.

Conclusion

For those who are not so experienced with .htaccess files there is an online tool for creating them. It’s useful for novice users to get started, and easy to use.

Attention GoDaddy users: In order to remove the extensions you need to enable MultiViews before. The code should look like this:

Options +MultiViews RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

If you’re worried that search engines might index these pages as duplicate content, add a <canonical> meta tag in the <head> of your HTML file: