WarpConduit Computing

Fix Redirection and Error Page On Empty WordPress Search

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I found out just recently that in some cases when you perform a blank search on a WordPress site you are redirected to the front page with an error message. If you encounter this issue simply apply the fix below, which modifies the blank search into a search for one space. This is enough to resolve the error page and land you on the search page.

Add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file to fix this annoying behavior:

if(!is_admin()){
	add_action('init', 'search_query_fix');
	function search_query_fix(){
		if(isset($_GET['s']) && $_GET['s']==''){
			$_GET['s']=' ';
		}
	}
}

Redirecting to www with htaccess

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This is useful for SEO so all your ranking gets added to one url and not divided between two.

Use the following example to create a redirect from any incoming domain to your www sub-domain:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

To use this method you need have mod_rewrite installed and enabled on Apache web server and you need to be able to create a custom .htaccess file.

A few things to note, the NC means that the regex is not case sensitive, R=301 means that this redirect will return an HTTP status code of 301 Permanent Redirect (search engine friendly), and the L after that means that no further rule processing should be done.