Help Needed with Netlify Redirects Not Working

Howdy,

Question: Help Needed with Netlify Redirects Not Working

Context:

I’m currently working on a project hosted on Netlify, and I’m trying to set up a redirect from the root of my site to a specific HTML page for age verification purposes. However, I keep encountering a “Page Not Found” error when I attempt to access my site.

Details:

• I have created a _redirects file in the root of my GitHub repository with the following line:
– / /verification-page.html 200

I’ve confirmed that verification-page.html exists in the repository and is included in the deployment.
I checked the Netlify deployment logs, which show that the site is live, and the _redirects file was processed. The logs indicate:
  • Post processing - redirect rules
    Post processing done

    Verified that the _redirects file is correctly named and located at the root level.
    2. Ensured the verification-page.html is present and accessible in the deployed site.
    3. Cleared browser cache and attempted to access the site in incognito mode.
    4. Tested accessing the root URL of my site (e.g., https://your-site-name.netlify.app/).
    5. Temporarily changed the _redirects rule to test a simple redirect:

/test /verification-page.html 200

Accessing https://your-site-name.netlify.app/test still results in a “Page Not Found” error.

Question:

What could be causing the redirect to fail, and how can I troubleshoot this further? Are there specific settings in Netlify or in the _redirects file that I might be missing? Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Since the status is 200 that is considered a rewrite not a redirect.
If working correctly the URL would remain as / but show the /verification-page.html page

How did you confirm this?
Using the Deploy File Browser?
Navigating directly to /verification-page.html?

Do you mean the root level of the repository, or the root level of the Publish directory?
It should be in the Publish directory.

I may be wrong, but I believe this usually mentions how many rules were processed.
You should check the location, name, contents of the _redirects file again.