Incorrect Root Domain Redirect to WWW

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1

Hi, we just cut over our DNS to our new webflow site from our former squarespace site.
Our address is www.gather.ai and our DNS provider is Route 53 / AWS. We are using www as the default domain and the root domain is set up to redirect to www. My problem is that I’m getting a suspicious answer from the redirect, although it seems to be working ok right now. For example, when we were on squarespace, the curl response to / was:

charliereverte@charlies-air-2 ~ % curl -v gather.ai
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Location: https://www.gather.ai/
(abbreviated)

After we cut over, the new response from webflow doesn’t redirect you to www. and the location instead points back at the root domain:
charliereverte@charlies-air-2 ~ % curl -v gather.ai
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Location: https://gather.ai/
(abbreviated)

I’m not sure how this is even working, I’m expecting this to be broken and cause a redirect loop but it seems ok right now. I’m worried that it is only working because of the old value being cached somewhere and it is going to break soon. Is this expected/normal? If so, why would the 301 response on a request to / not send you to www domain?

thanks,
Charlie

2

I resolved my own issue. I’m leaving my notes here instead of deleting the topic for anyone who encounters this in the future. What webflow is doing differently from squarespace is that it is first redirecting you to https on the root domain, which then sends you to https on the www (default) domain. The redirect response on the root domain when you make an https request correctly goes over to the www domain. There’s probably a security reason for this. Seems like it is working fine, issue is resolved.

3

From what I’ve seen, Webflow’s SSL Redirector ( http: → https: ) and their Default Domain Redirector ( whatever → e.g. www.yourdomain.com ), execute as two separate steps.

I think this is a fairly standard setup for webservers, and in your curl, it was likely requesting http:

Here’s what I see if I request explicitly with https:// against the root domain.

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