Webflow wants to handle the naked domain redirect to www for us.
That’s nice.
Unfortunately webflow uses a 301 (permanent) redirect without any cache-control headers which means browser will cache this as long as possible and won’t check again.
This means that if we move to another site or have to revert our site (our previous site was hosted on naked domain with www redirecting to root) we cannot do this easily because anyone that saw the new site will have the permanent redirect cached.
Webflow should either add cache-control header on the 301 (e.g. so that users check back once per hour) or switch to 302.
…if they don’t then we are effectively stuck on www forever unless we want to try and tell the internet to force clear their browser caches. Hah.
Poorly thought out on webflows part. Something to be aware of if you care about things like this. You may want to maintain your own redirect to avoid this issue until webflow fixes it.
We self-host most things. Our site was self-hosted prior to the new webflow site.
Webflow wants to host your site at www.
Their instructions say to add DNS records for both @ (root/naked domain) and www.
The reason they want you to add the @ records is so they can manage the redirects for you from naked domain to www. This is the problematic 301 I mentioned above.
If you want to manage your own redirects, then you only add the webflow DNS record for www and manage the redirect from root domain to www yourself (so you can do 302 or 301 with cache control).
In terms of “how” you do it, it depends. Some managed DNS services have built-in http redirection services (DNSMadeEasy for instance). For us we already have a lot of webserver boxes around so we just keep the root domain pointing (DNS) at one of our boxes and configure it to do the LetsEncrypt/redirect stuff we need to redirect requests to the www-hosted webflow site.