How to redirect immediately to HTTPS://WWW (without redirect chain)

Website, Application, Performance Security
1

Hi there,

I played around a few hours with different options and could not get it right.

My redirects from http or http://www to https://www work but I have a redirect chain I would love to avoid.

Site: https://www.biohof-bart.at/

What is the right way of setting it up this way?

I know there are several options and I probably just need the right combination of it:

  • Cloudflare > enable/disable force HTTPS
  • Cloudflare > SSL Full
  • Cloudflare > SSL Full (strict) and generating a free TLS certificate signed by Cloudflare to install on my origin Cloudways server
  • Cloudways > enable/disable force HTTPS
  • Cloudways > .htaccess redirect rules
  • …

I just could not manage it till now to always directly redirect to https://www

Any idea or instruction on what’s necessary to get the expected result?

Thanks a lot in advance!

1 Like
2

Hi @raabmar, I am not sure I’m tracking exactly with what you’re asking.

  • WRT Full or Full (strict), full (strict) is a bit better if you have set up the right cert on your origin.
  • WRT always use https, that is a good setting to enable
  • Cloudways, why? does not seem necessary

WRT always going to https://www, check out the #Tutorials, in particular these two on page rules, Redirect example.com to www.example.com & Redirect www.example.com to example.com . Post back and let us know how it’s going, site looks good to me atm, if you are having issues you may want to try a mobile, incognito, and/or clear cache.

1 Like
3

Thanks - I will have a look at the additional tutorials.

From what you describe, that is what I tried already. At Cloudways I tried “force HTTPS” enabled & disabled.

If you look at https://redirectdetective.com/ you’ll see that it is not directly getting redirected.

Screenshot 2020-12-15 at 00.05.46
Screenshot 2020-12-15 at 00.05.461252Ă—1298 52.7 KB

4

The only way to guarantee a single-redirect:

  1. Disable Always Use HTTPS
  2. Page Rule: Match http://www.example.com/* and set Always Use HTTPS
  3. Page Rule: Match example.com/* and Redirect to https://www.example.com/$1
1 Like
5

Having a look at those tutorials, I really wonder if I need page rules for such a simple case - all I would need is to forward everything (one single redirect) to https://www.

I remember I played hours around with regex once, thus I try to avoid it as much as I can.

6

Yesss … that worked!!

I really did not expect that I need page rules for this.

Thanks a lot!

2 Likes
7

Additionally:

Interestingly, I could enable forced HTTPS as well in Cloudways and it does not have a negative impact. Probably, as Cloudways never must force HTTPS (when only HTTPS traffic reaches cloudways).

I wonder if SSL full (strict) with a Cloudflare certificate is also required in this case. Till now, I always had SSL full (strict) with a Let’s Encrypt certificate from Cloudways and it seemed to work well.

8

You can live quite comfortably without those page rules. Search Engines will find the canonical URL for your site, then stick with that. Anybody who does a search for your site won’t get any redirects. People who manually type the domain name in won’t notice the speed of the Always Use HTTPS redirect.

I do use a www to naked domain Page Rule because it’s faster than letting my server do it and I’m not running out of Page Rules.

9

I thought it’s best practice to avoid those redirects. Ahrefs showed it as well, so I thought I must try to fix this. But perhaps you are right, and it does not matter too much.

1 Like
10

This topic was automatically closed 24 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.