How to redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS

Question

I\'m trying to redirect all insecure HTTP requests on my site (e.g. http://www.example.com) to HTTPS (https://www.example.com). I\'m using PHP btw.

Answer 1

Not only can you do this in your .htaccess file, you should be doing this period. You will also want to follow the steps here to get your site listed on the HSTS preload list after you implement this redirect so that any requests to the insecure http version of your website never make it past the user agent. Instead, the user agent checks the requested URI against a baked in list of https only websites and, if the requested URI is on that list, changes the protocol from http to https before transmitting the request to the server. Therefore, the insecure request never makes it out into the wild and never hits the server. Eventually when the internet changes over to https only the HSTS preload list will not be needed. Until then, every site should be using it.

In order to perform the redirect, we need to enable the rewrite engine and then redirect all traffic from the http port 80 to https.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://yourwebsite.tld/$1 [L,R=301]