Redirect everything except /wp-admin and wp-login.php

Often, a client asks us to take down a site — either temporarily or permanently — but they still need access to their WordPress administrative panel.

As usual, there are lots of different ways to accomplish this; many SEO plugins allow you to create redirects, but require you to do so one post at a time. How tedious!

Fortunately, htaccess makes this simple, but I spent well over an hour googling for a solution that actually worked. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Just make this edit to your .htaccess file, substituting new-site.com with the domain you want to redirect to. Place this code at the top of your file, above the # BEGIN WordPress block.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(.*)?wp-login\.php(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(.*)?wp-admin$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(wp-includes/.*|wp-admin/.*|wp-content/.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://new-domain.com [R=301,L]

# BEGIN WordPress
...

[caution_htaccess]

We hope this helps!