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How to redirect non-www to www and vice-versa
How to redirect non-www to www and vice-versa

Redirecting your entire domain name to a subdomain or non-www to www

Tomohyco Tsunoda avatar
Written by Tomohyco Tsunoda
Updated over 2 years ago

TL;DR

  • Shifter supports both non-www and www.

  • Shifter cannot redirect one to the other at this time.

  • Most DNS providers support this type of redirect as a standard feature.

  • If not, there are 3rd party providers who can also provide this for free.

Shifter supports both Apex (the non-www version) domains and subdomains such as www.example.com.

Both domains technically can be used at the same time. However, when adding a custom domain, it's common to choose and use only one.

In this example, we'll assume that you want to use the www version of your domain name.

To do this you must either have a DNS provider that offers 301 redirects for domains or URL forwarding or you'll have to connect your domain to a 3rd party redirect provider.

 

Domain Forwarding with DNS

This is the easiest option but not all DNS providers support this. For example, here are a few known providers that do.

These are publicly available guides on how to redirect the non-www version of your domain to the www or similar using just DNS.

 

Domain Forwarding with 3rd Party Providers

This is known as Redirects-as-a-Service. If your DNS provider cannot support URI/URL/Domain redirects, there are partners to help.

Our go-to partner for this is EasyRedir.

They offer a simple redirect by pointing the non-www version of your domain to their service and forwarding it along to any domain you need.

This type of redirect is covered under their free tier. More info how how to set up this type of redirect can be found here.

Domain Forwarding with Shifter redirects

Shifter Redirects plugin

This plugin offers domain name redirection such as https://www.example.com to https://example.com.

Four steps to use this plugin:

  1. Download an install (you can do it via the Theme/Plugin installer)

  2. Activate it

  3. Set Source and Destination

  4. Generate and publish

Why doesn't Shifter offer Domain Redirects?

We get this question a lot. To answer this it's important to know how redirects work.

Redirects happen either at the DNS layer or on the server itself using software like Apache or NGINX.

Since does not maintain or have control over your DNS and we are completely serverless, we don't support DNS redirects for this reason.

It's important to also note this may change in the future! We do see a lot of value in offering this service to make it easier for everyone to hit the ground running.

If you're unsure if your DNS provider supports this or you need help setting it up we are happy to help! Just let us know.

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