Adding trailing slashes and redirecting to www in .htaccess

Question

I'm using the following code in my .htaccess in order to redirect to the www version of the website and also to add a trailing slash by default. It all seems to work, but I wondered is this the most efficient way of doing it. I'm no expert on this side of things, so I've bolted this lot together from the official EE docs and a couple of separate articles I found on the subject.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond $1 !^(admin|assets|uploads|favicon\.ico|robots\.txt|index\.php) [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]

AddHandler php5-script .php

Should I (if possible) combine the rules? At the minute you can end up with two 301 redirects if you go to the non www version of the website without the trailing slash.

My motivation for making these changes is to improve the general SEO of the site, so any tips are most welcome.

Answer 1

Here's a gist I've made that you can comment/uncomment out the bits you need. To date I haven't found the need to combine rules and I haven't found many examples that actually do combine rules. I'd love to see them if find some though.

Lastly, I normally move the AddHandler stuff up in the .htaccess and keep the rewrite stuff below it.