WPEngine Causing Redirect Chain
-
Hi guys,
Had a quick question that I wanted to verify here. After reviewing a Moz report we received some redirect chain error on all of our sites hosted with WPEngine. We noticed that the redirect chain appears to be coming from how the domains are configured in their control panel.
Essentially, there is a redirect:
- from staging/temp -> to live
- from non-www -> to www
- SSL redirect from http -> https
The issue here is that the non-www is redirecting to www and then redirected again to https://www
According to support the only way to get rid of this error is to drop the www version of the domain and to host everything under https://domain.com. To me it seems very odd that you cannot just go from http://non-www to https://www in just 1 301 redirect.
Has anyone else experienced this or am I just not looking at the situation correctly?
-
@AaronHenry This works. i had numerous redirect hops on wpengine. i followed these industructions and my issue went away. Make sure you clear cache when you do this (on the site and wpengine cache)... also make sure you dont have any redirects on the domain or cloud flare dns file level. Remove any redriects of the primary and set www. as the primary.
-
Hi Jared,
In the WPE redirect rule editor, it doesn't provide an option for the non-www domain. Only "All domains" and "www.mywwwdomain.com". What do you suggest doing here to eliminate the redirect chain?
-
Hi Donna,
Thanks for the followup!
This method would work for both www and non-www to get it over to https://. We handle redirects on the Nginx layer, so by adding in a Redirect Rule it overwrites any default platform redirect rules in the User Portal and ensures your preferred setup is handled first.
If you run into any trouble getting it configured, please reach out to us and we'll be glad to ensure it gets set up properly. Should anyone tell you it's not possible, request that they reach out to me and I'll be sure to instruct them on the method to get it squared away.
Cheers,
Jared Arnold -
Hi Aaron,
You're very welcome and I'm glad that you've been overall enjoying the platform!
It's very possible that they didn't quite grasp the request, though it is a bit of an SEO quirk to configure. I'll be following up with some of our team to help ensure our internal documentation's up to date so that should this be asked in the future, we can provide a more consistent experience for you.
Thanks!
Jared Arnold -
Same question but for the www version of the site. Can it route directly to HTTPS without a redirect? Do I just have to delete the existing non-www to www redirect and follow your logic above? It will take care of both www and non-www redirecting to HTTPS?
I have also asked the help desk several times for a solution, although not recently. I was told it wasn't possible.
-
Thanks for this information! All of the support agents I spoke with told me that it was not possible. They were all extremely professional, but perhaps they didn't understand what I was asking. I'm glad to hear there is a way to make it happen. WPE is a great platform for us.
-
Hey Aaron!
Jared from WP Engine here.
I just wanted to reach out and provide a bit of clarification on the redirect chain here. On our platform, it is possible to have non-www go to https://www directly.
To do so, it requires adding each domain individually within the User Portal under 'Domains'. (not combining them under redirects) Once done, you then create a Redirect Rule within the 'Redirect Rules' section with the following parameters:
Name: (this can be anything)
Domain: (your non-www domain)
Source: ^/(.*)
Destination: https://www.yourwwwdomain.com/$1Once configured and the cache purged, a request to the non-www version of your address will skip the http://www redirect and go directly to the secure https://www version.
If you run into any trouble getting it set up, please reach out to our team and we will be glad to help configure it for you.
Thanks,
Jared Arnold -
Just thought I'd shoot an update - according to WPEngine the redirect will always be there. No way around it on their platform.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Htaccess redirects
Annoyingly it's time to play with this beast again. I've been given the task of doing the following. Keeping the homepage live Redirecting categories to the specific categories on the new site Catch all redirects Now i've managed to setup the specific categories and the catch all redirects, however I am unsure how to keep the homepage live (which is like this:www.domain.com/ so I can't just exclude that?) Would appreciate any help.
Technical SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Tracing Redirects to a Site
I wonder if anyone has used any tools where you can trace the redirects pointing to a site? I know there are a number of tools out there that can be used to check where a URL redirects to, but I was wondering if anyone has used a tool where I could trace all redirects with the final URL? I am using this for competitor research so I don't have access to Analytics or Webmaster Tools.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
Htaccess redirect with question mark
Hi I have a problem setting up my htaccess for a specific page that has a question mark in the link, and one that has a space in the link and also a question mark. So I would like 2 redirects in my htaccess like that: www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=pagename1 to www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=page name2 to www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html I have tried with something like this but doesn't work: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page.php?page=pagename1 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html" [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^page.php?page=page name2 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html" [R=301,L] Could someone tell me what exactly I have to change? Thanks
Technical SEO | | darkanweb0 -
How long should I keep 301 redirects?
I have modified a the URL structure of a whole section of a website and used mod_rewrite 301 redirect to match the new structure. Now that was around 3 months ago and I was wondering how long should I keep this redirect for? As it is a new website I am quite sure that there are no links around with the old URL structure but still I can see the google bot trying from time to time to access the old URL structure. Shouldn't the google bot learn from this 301 redirect and not go anymore for the old URL?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards0 -
302 or 301 redirect to https ?
I am redirecting whole site to https. Is there a difference between 302 or 301 redirect for seo? Site never been indexed. Planning to do that with .htaccess command RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
Technical SEO | | Kotkov
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] There are plenty of ways http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html Which way would be the best? Thanks is advance0 -
Advises for redirects
I worked on a website since 2 years now (mainly link building). Now, I need to change the CMS and the hosting company of this website. In order to improve the SEO of this website, I decided to change the URL structure as well, see example here below: Actual situation: http://www.mywebsite.com
Technical SEO | | Tit
http://walla.mywebsite.com/
http://ortak.mywebsite.com/ http://www.mywebsite.com/de
http://walla.mywebsite.com/de
http://ortak.mywebsite.com/de http://www.mywebsite.com/es
http://walla.mywebsite.com/es
http://ortak.mywebsite.com/es Future situation: http://www.mywebsite.com
http://www.mywebsite.com/walla
http://www.mywebsite.com/ortak http://www.mywebsite.com/es
http://www.mywebsite.com/es/walla
http://www.mywebsite.com/es/ortak http://www.mywebsite.com/de
http://www.mywebsite.com/de/walla
http://www.mywebsite.com/de/ortak Since the hosting, the CMS and the URL’s will change, what you recommend me to do in order to keep a maximum of “link juice” to the pages!? How / Where to setup the 301 redirects?0 -
How to find a specific link on my website (currently causing redirects)
Hi everyone, I've used crawlers like Xenu to find broken links before, and I love these tools. What I can't figure out is how to find specific pieces of code within my site. For example, Webmaster Tools tells me there are still links to old pages somewhere on my website but I just can't find them. Do you know of a crawler that can search for a specific link within the html? Thanks in advance, Josh
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0