Thanks Shane.
Cloudflare’s CNAME flattening works well, I use it on occasion also. However browsers already tend to hide the www and the redirect works either way, so IMO there isn’t even much of an aesthetic benefit these days.
The issues I see are more specific to not setting a default domain at all.
There are some scenarios like a site merge or specialized SEO, where it makes sense to have several different domains pointing to the same Webflow hosted site. Sometimes clients still want sitea.com and siteb.com to appear in the URL bar for branding familiarity for those clients- even though they are the same site.
That used to partly work, but currently I encounter 3 issues frequently-
- The www.www issue sometimes occurs
- The too many redirects issue sometimes occurs
- Sitemaps and canonicals are incorrect
On that 3rd item- in effect when you hit publish Webflow seems to randomly pick one of the domains, and use it in the generation of the canonicals and the sitemap. Each time you publish, that can change.
The main impact is SEO. Google requires that the origin in the sitemap matches the origin of the URLs it contains- but here you’d have a sitea.com/sitemap.xml filled with siteb.com content - so GSC rejects them.
Note taht I haven’t retested this in years, it just became my standard operating procedure to always set a default domain to avoid all 3 problems.