How to redirect an https site from www to non www

Question

After adding an SSL certificate I want to 301-redirect all my site's URL variations to non-www ones. I tried creating a redirect from cPanel for all other variations.

Every other URL variations redirect except for https://www.example.com, this one does not redirect to https://example.com. Both URLs can be accessed and won't redirect to the non-www ones.

I've added canonical, Google has crawled and indexed both. Analytics gave a redundant hostname notification. I also tried redirecting from an htaccess file using these code:

# BEGIN SSL
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ https://example.com$1 [R,L]
# END SSL

and

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Both failed.

All I want is to redirect all URL variations, secure or non-secure, to https://example.com (non-www secure version).

Answer 1

Your first code has 2 errors in the RewriteRule directive:

• ^$ does not capture anything, so $1 is always empty here.
• A slash is missing before $1, because if it could have captured something like Foo.html, the substitution URL would be of the form https://example.comFoo.html.

Your second code seems valid to me, although the RewriteBase directive is useless since your are using an absolute substitution URL. I do not understand why it does not redirect www-URLs to secured non-www URLs. Something must be interfering with this code.

Finally, in your case, for redirecting every alternative URLs to the secured non-www URLs, an adequate set of Apache directives for an .htaccess file could be:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule (.*) https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Make sure that some of your cPanel redirection settings do not interfere with these directives.