Redirect www. URLs to non-www within Cloudflare

Q: How do you redirect a www. URL to the non-www URL within Cloudflare?
A: With a custom Redirect Rule!
Cloudflare now supports using Redirect Rules to map a www. request to your root domain; This article walks you through setting one up.

Introduction

I’ve occasionally run into the annoying problem of trying to map www. requests to the non-www version (aka the “root” or “apex”). Given I use Cloudflare to manage most of my domains, and given everything else they offer, I figured they’d have a way to re-map these routes.

Turns out, Redirect Rules are what I — and probably you — are after.

Cloudflare’s Redirect Rules let you re-map requests to your website and forward them to another URL, including using wildcards (*) and wildcard passthroughs (${1}, ${2} etc.). These are what we’ll use to re-map a request from www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com.

You can specify a 30x status code for your redirect, which makes these quite versatile. You’ll almost certainly want to use a 301 redirect — as of mid-2016, they don’t affect SEO.

Creating a Redirect Rule to map www. requests to non-www.

Note: As of Sept 5th, Cloudflare has a selection of Rules Templates you can pick directly from, including a “Redirect from WWW to Root” rule! This is probably exactly what you’re after — just go to Rules > Templates > Redirect from WWW to Root > Create a Rule, and you should be all set!

It takes less than 2 minutes to use Cloudflare to redirect www requests to non-www ones. Open your Cloudflare Dashboard, select a website, then go to Rules > Redirect Rules > Single Redirects > [+ Create rule].

You might get prompted to directly create a “Redirect from WWW to Root” rule, in which case just click “Create a Rule”, save it, and you’re done!

To add a WWW to Root redirect rule manually though, do the following:

1. Give your rule a name,
2. Make sure Wildcard pattern is selected, then set “Request URL” to https://www.* — this globs everything after www., which we can access using ${1} in the Target URL section.
3. Set “Target URL” to https://${1}, and status code to 301 — a 301 redirect status indicates a permanent redirect, and as of mid-2016, don’t affect SEO.
4. You probably want to check “Preserve query string” to ensure any query params to the original www URL are passed-through by Cloudflare to the non-www URL.
5. Click “Deploy” and you’re done!

Conclusion

Hope that was helpful! I spent a while trawling through old forum answers and setting up a similar rule using the now deprecated Page Rules — I threw together this short guide so you don’t have to do the same!

I haven’t noticed any SEO / Google Search Console downsides to using this. In fact, there’s far fewer duplicate-URLs in my Google Search Console, which I can only assume is somewhat positive. YMMV but so far, so good.