If I have set up my www as a cname, do I still need to add a redirect?

[Dandelion]

Hello,

I am trying to minimize my redirect chains that have been popping up in my Moz crawl issues. So I'd like to get clear on some best practices. I have a few clients that are getting their first redesign in a while. We are moving into Wordpress from good ole .html files. So I've installed a redirection plug in to create 301 redirects for those .html versions of the pages.

But apparently I am already redirecting from www to non-www. I have the www set up as a CNAME going to the IP address - is that counting as the redirection? Sometimes though, the www is set up by making it an A record. Is one way better than the other?

Finally, I'm forcing https for all my new sites now. Is whatever the host does to "force" https also counting as a redirect and contributing to my chain?

Any advice will be appreciated!

[Dandelion]

Thank you!

Yep - I redirect the .html files to the https domain to as specific a page as possible. Its good to know that I don't have to factor in the CNAME or A records into the issue.

It sounds like I am doing the right things from what you say - yet I do have some redirect chain warnings in my Moz crawl.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I'd like to confirm that a CNAME is indeed not a redirect and that Steve is absolutely right. You will need to set up a proper 301 redirect to go from one to the other.

[slatronica]

\The redirects for the old .html structure should go to the preferred  domain, ie: https://nonwww.com/most-relevant-new-location

CNAME is not a redirect and just points the user to the right server and I don't think switching is going to have any impact on what you're seeing. Some services like Cloudflare prefer you CNAME your www and non-www to the server to help protect the server IP.

The switch to https is an important one and you want to be sure that you take every step to make that smooth transition, ultimately getting https pages ranked instead of your http versions, and then users will be hitting your preferred URL scheme.