root page

First I need to understand what you are doing.

Sounds like you still have the dot.net site still set up and you are just redirecting the links from the old site to the new site?

If so, that is really the wrong way to go about moving a domain. If you want to move an entire domain, the best way is to forward it to the new domain at your registrar (where you bought the domain name from). That will cause any URL to the old site to go to the New domain and still keep all the query string and URL data. THEN, after it reaches the new site, you would redirect as needed. Of the structure is the same as the old site, no redirection would even be necessary.

The plugin is really designed to handle redirects for pages/posts that may no longer exist (due to changing site layout or moving), pages/posts that have a new permalink (maybe you changed for SEO or just fixed a bad permalink), and even to create shorter links to a long page/post. It is not designed to redirect and entire site to a new domain. There are much more efficient (and simple) ways to do that.

If that is not what you are trying to do, let me know and I will try and help you out.

Oh, and to answer the actual question you asked:

any issues why this might be happening?

The answer is, yes, there are issues. Even in normal usage of the plugin, the home page of a WordPress site is a lot different than any other page of a site. Under normal setup, the home page is a list of posts. If you change it in the setting to go to another page, WordPress loads the page during the template redirect action. It basically does the same for the posts page too, and this overrides the plugin functionality because of when the plugin hooks into WordPress to look for a redirect. We can’t hook any sooner (in most cases) or the normal WordPress functionality would be bypassed and we would not be able to perform some of the checks we need to do to check the redirect.

So redirecting the home page is always a challenge.

BUT – if you REALLY need to redirect the home page, you can do this trick to force a redirect:

1. Set the WordPress home page to a specific page that you have set up or create a new one and set that as the home page (Under Settings/Reading menu).
2. Go in and Edit the page you set up as the home page.
3. In the Page Post Redirect section of the edit screen, put in the URL of where you want the redirect to go and check the active box (set tyoe to 301 or 302).
4. Update the page

Your home page should now redirect to the page or URL you want.
This will not work if you have the home page set as posts.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
Don

Ok, makes sense.
Then do what I mentioned about forcing the redirect. Set you homepage of the .net site to a page and then redirect that page. That should work and still maintain the integrity of the SEO results ( As WordPress will take care of the main homepage load and then it will redirect with a 301 to the new site home page ).

Regards,
Don