How to set up website redirects after enabling url rewriting?

Question

I inherited a site that was not configured with url rewriting, leaving the index.php as a part of all the site's urls. I plan to implement this, but we also have over a year's worth of posts spread across at least three different social media. I'm guessing that I need to configure some sort of redirect to make sure that the old links map to the new links, is that right? Is this something I have to do in an .htaccess file, or is there a module for this. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Once URL Rewriting is enabled, links including index.php will still work.

To help preserve search engine rankings you can redirect the urls that include index.php to the non-index.php versions using .htaccess like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,NE,L]

Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24008632/1983389