.htaccess Generator
Generate Apache rules without the guesswork.
Create redirects, HTTPS enforcement, caching and security rules for Apache .htaccess safely.
What you get
Everything .htaccess Generator delivers, out of the box.
Redirects & rewrites
HTTPS & www canonicalization
Caching & security headers
Free to use
How it works
From input to insight in three steps.
Enter your URL or keyword
Point .htaccess Generator at any page, domain or search term, yours or a competitor's.
SEO Roger analyzes it
We run the analysis with our crawler and validators in seconds.
Get a prioritized report
Read a clear, ranked breakdown of exactly what to do next.
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What is .htaccess Generator?
The .htaccess Generator produces Apache configuration for the tasks that most often go wrong by hand: redirects, forcing HTTPS, canonical host rules, caching headers and basic security directives. It is free on every plan.
How to use .htaccess Generator
From signup to shipped fix, this is the whole loop.
- 1Create a free accountSign up in under a minute. No credit card is required, and your first site scan works without an account at all.
- 2Point .htaccess Generator at your siteEnter the URL or domain you want to analyze. You can run it on your own site or on a competitor's.
- 3Let it pull the live data.htaccess Generator fetches the current state of the page or domain and runs its checks. Most runs finish in seconds.
- 4Read the ranked findingsResults come back ordered by impact rather than by count, so the issue costing you the most traffic is at the top, not buried under cosmetic warnings.
- 5Ship the fix, then re-runApply the recommended change, or let Roger AI draft it for you, then run the tool again to confirm the issue is resolved and track the improvement.
Why .htaccess Generator matters
.htaccess is powerful, unforgiving and capable of taking a site completely offline from a single syntax error, because Apache stops serving rather than ignoring the bad line. Redirect rules in particular are easy to write in a way that appears to work while creating loops or stripping query strings. Generating known-good patterns removes most of that risk.
Search is no longer only Google. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude answer a growing share of queries by reading the same pages crawlers do, then citing a handful of sources. SEO Roger keeps both audiences in view: the classic SERP and the AI answer, from one workspace.
Who it's for
- In-house SEOs who need crawling, indexing and structured data without stitching three tools together
- Agencies and consultants producing client-ready findings, fast
- Founders and marketers who want the fix, not just the metric
.htaccess Generator in depth
Apache only, which is the first thing to check
.htaccess is an Apache feature. It does nothing on nginx, which uses a different configuration system entirely, and nothing on most managed or serverless hosts. If your site runs on nginx, rules pasted into a .htaccess file will be silently ignored and you will spend an afternoon wondering why nothing changed. Confirm your server software before starting.
301 and 302 mean different things to search engines
A 301 is permanent and tells search engines to transfer the old URL's accumulated signals to the new one and update the index. A 302 is temporary and tells them to keep the original indexed. Using 302 for a permanent move is a common and quietly expensive error, because the new URL never inherits the equity and the old one lingers in the index. When a move is permanent, say so with a 301.
Chains and loops
Redirect chains, where A points to B which points to C, waste crawl budget and lose a little value at each hop. Loops, where A eventually points back to A, make the page completely unreachable and return a browser error. Both are usually the result of rules accumulating over years, each written without reference to the ones already there. Audit the whole file when adding to it, and verify the final destination with the HTTP Status Checker.
Enforce one canonical host
If your site answers on both www and non-www, and on both http and https, you have up to four addresses for every page. Search engines usually work it out, but not always cleanly, and it splits signals in the meantime. One rule redirecting every variant to a single canonical host and scheme resolves it permanently and is among the highest-value things in this file.
.htaccess Generator questions, answered
Does the generator cost credits?
No. It is free on every plan.
What if my site does not run Apache?
Then .htaccess will not work at all. nginx, IIS and most managed platforms use their own configuration formats, and rules must be translated rather than copied. Check what your server runs before you start; if you are unsure, your host can tell you in a sentence.
Can a bad .htaccess take my site down?
Yes, and this is the main reason to be careful. Apache treats a syntax error in .htaccess as fatal for the directory it governs and returns a 500 error rather than skipping the bad line. Always back up the existing file before editing, and test the site immediately after saving, because the failure is total rather than partial.
301 or 302 for a permanent move?
301. It transfers ranking signals to the new URL and updates the index. A 302 tells search engines the change is temporary and to keep the old URL indexed, so a permanent move labelled 302 leaves the new page without the equity it should have inherited.
Do redirects lose ranking value?
A single 301 to a genuinely equivalent page preserves the large majority of it. Value is lost through chains of several hops, and more seriously through redirecting to a page that does not correspond to the original, since a redirect to an unrelated page is treated much like a soft 404.
Should I use .htaccess for caching rules?
It works, and it is a reasonable place for cache headers on a shared host where you have no other access. If you can edit the main server configuration instead, that is faster, because Apache reads .htaccess files on every request while main configuration is loaded once.
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