Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Woocommerce add-to-cart causing increase in temporary redirect
Hi, I was wondering is negatively influencing the SEO. Woocommerce add-to-cart is, logically, a 302. However, MOZ is alarming that there is a large amount of temporary redirects on my site. Do I have to act on this or just leave as is? I change the nofollow to follow but not sure if this does more harm then good. Would like to hear some input regarding this issue.
Technical SEO | | ruevoliere0 -
What could cause Google to not honor canonical URLs?
I have a strange situation on a website, when I do a Google query of site:example.com all the top indexed results appear to be queries that users can perform on the website. So any random term the user searches for on the website for some reason is causing the search result page to get indexed - like example.com/search/query/random-keywords However, the search results page has a canonical tag on it that points to example.com/search, but that doesn't seem to be doing anything. Any thoughts or ideas why this could be happening?
Technical SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Is link equity passed through redirect chains?
Hi there, When redirects are passed through multiple stages e.g. https://www.google.com 301 to http://www.bing.com 301 to http://www.yahoo.com Does http://www.yahoo.com still retain all link equity from the original referring domain, and is there a limit to the redirect chain before Google starts to not pass through link equity? Cheers
Technical SEO | | Corbec8881 -
Is there a limit to Internal Redirect?
I know Google says there is no limit to it but I have seen on many websites that too many 301 redirects can be a problem and might negatively affect your rankings in SERPs. I wanted to know especially from people who worked on large ecommerce site. How do they manage internal redirect from one URL to other and how many according to you are too many. I mean if you get a website that contain 300 plus 301 redirections within the website, how will you deal with that? Please let me know if the question is not clear.
Technical SEO | | MoosaHemani0 -
How do I redirect the Author archive page in Wordpress?
If you do a search for my name on Google, the first result is the author archive page of my Wordpress blog. I would like to redirect the author page to my "about me" page but cannot add a 301 as the author page is created dynamically in Wordpress. Anyone know how I can do this?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
How do I redirect index.html to the root / ?
The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0 -
If a redirecting URL has more value than the website should I move it?
Client has two website addresses: Website A is a redirect to Website B. It has one indexed page. But this is the URL being used in collateral. It has the majority of back links, and citations everywhere list Website A as the URL. Website B is where the actual website lives. Google recognizes and indexes the 80+ pages. This website has very few backlinks going to it. This setup does not seem good for SEO. Moreover, the analytics data is completely messed up because Website B shows that the biggest referral source is... you guessed it Website A. I'm thinking going forward, I should: Move all the content from Website B to Website A. Setup Website B to permanently 301 Redirect to Website A. Is that the best course of action?
Technical SEO | | flowsimple0