My site brand (and also how I want to continue building its brand) is in this form: “https://url.com”, and it is also the form that all of its backlinks point to.
However, both Google and Bing indexed all of its pages in this URL form: “https://www.url.com/”. And I noticed that on Google Analytics, whenever I fetch the site’s “https://url.com” form for inspection to submit for indexing, it always return this error message: “Page is not indexed: Redirect error”, and would not index it.
So, should I change the preferred site url and on all of its pages to “https://url.com”, or leave everything as is?
Webflow requires the subdomain, i.e. www unless your DNS supports a feature called CNAME flattening.
Not many do, but Cloudflare’s free DNS does, so that’s an option.
Currently, your setup requires www to be the primary domain, and that means requests to https://url.com are redirecting to https://www.url.com- which is why you’re seeing those errors.
The process would be;
Migrate your DNS to a DNS service like Cloudflare that supports CNAME flattening
Reconfigure your DNS and Webflow for CNAME flattening
Make your bare domain the primary
Republish
Update your GA4, GSC, etc to use https://url.com as the correct format
Once you’ve done that, your www version will redirect to the base domain, and eventually, search engines will update.
Overall this migration isn’t that complex, but it’s easy to mess up. If you’re looking to hire someone to fix this for you, drop me a message.
There shouldn’t be any impact. All the pages are still there and content is unchanged, at the end you’re just reversing the redirects. Google is good at adapting to that.
So if I change this, do I need to change the URLs for all pages or only the homepage? And then afterwards, do I need to add 301 redirects to all page URLs?