So my boss wants me to change the landing page url from www.ourwebsite.com to www.ourwebsite.com/info (it’s for his marketing). I’m using Joomla 3.9.22. I thought I could just rename the front/featured page to “info” and create a featured menu item for it but it’s not working.
Is there a way to do this? Thanks in advance for any help.
My Joomla experience is pretty shallow, so I have no idea if you can designate what url should be used for the home page or not. You could always add a redirect script to the default home page that forwards to /info. That might not be the most elegant solution, but it is a solution.
BOOM! 
That’ll work.
I was pretty sure I could do it with a menu item, really easily. I thought wrong,
Thanks Steve!
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Happy to help.
I’m a little confused since Joomla’s pages are somewhat independent of the site’s directory structure. Does your Joomla installation actually reside in the /info/ directory or do you have a static HTML file there that’s independent from Joomla?
Anyway, it’s better to use a server-side redirect rather than a client-side script. Although the client-side script will work, there’s a performance hit since it require serving two separate pages. The first one with the script that the client computer executes to call in the second page. It also risks a possible SEO ranking problem.
A server-side redirect avoids these two problems.
Do you have FTP or SFTP access to the server? If so, are you familiar with the .htaccess file that resides at the HTTP root directory of the server? This is the directory from which your website’s pages are served. In your example, /info/ would be a subdirectory of the HTTP root directory.
You can implement a server-side redirect by adding a new chunk of code called a directive to the .htaccess file. This directive will tell Apache (the server software) to serve the index file in /info/ rather than heading through the index.php Joomla file in your HTTP root. The .htaccess file can be used for all kinds of things, but server-side redirects are one of the most common.
If you’re not familiar with this, it can get a little complicated. Messing around with the .htaccess file is also a bit dangerous given that it controls what Apache does and can break your site if done wrong.
Still interested? Or do you just want to stick with the client-side script? If you’re interested, you can Google .htaccess redirects. I can give you instructions too. On several sites I used to manage (including Joomla sites), I worked with .htaccess directives quite often.
Thanks B, yup I got the .htaccess file redirect answer at the Joomla forums.
What I’ve done is create another page where if someone is directed to ourwebsite.com at Directnic, they hit the site. Same page as www.ourwebsite.com (it’s a tiny website but it’s huge for this marketing endeavor). I think my question for him is why? Like I said I thought it was as simple as changing up the menu item, obviously not. And frankly I’m not sure what his reasoning is, so we’ll see. If he insists, I can attempt the .htaccess redirect or just have the hosting site deal with it.
Yeah, Joomla’s (or any database-driven CMS’s) internal directory structure is something of an illusion designed to help make organizational sense of the site (like menu structures).
Behind the scenes, Joomla’s doing its own thing that’s largely independent of that illusory hierarchy it created for the benefit of the humans who use it. This can lead to some seemingly logical but frustratingly faulty assumptions about things that seem like they should work but don’t.
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