How to Redirect www to Apex Domain in Cloudflare

What you're doing and why it's painful

If someone visits www.yourdomain.com, they should land on yourdomain.com — the same page, no dead end. Without a redirect, you have duplicate content (bad for SEO) and confused visitors.

Cloudflare can handle this entirely at the edge, before the request ever hits your server. The pain: the redirect lives in a different part of the dashboard depending on your Cloudflare plan, the SSL setting has to be right or you'll get redirect loops, and getting the $1 wildcard wrong means your redirect strips the path.

Prerequisites

• Your domain is using Cloudflare DNS (orange cloud icon)
• You have access to the Cloudflare dashboard for that zone

Option A — Redirect Rules (recommended, free plan)

Cloudflare's Redirect Rules are the modern replacement for Page Rules. They work on all plans including free.

1. Log in to Cloudflare dashboard
2. Select your domain
3. Go to Rules → Redirect Rules
4. Click Create rule
5. Name it: Redirect www to apex
6. Under When incoming requests match..., set:
   • Field: Hostname
   • Operator: equals
   • Value: www.yourdomain.com
7. Under Then..., set:
   • Type: Dynamic
   • Expression: concat("https://yourdomain.com", http.request.uri.path)
   • Status code: 301
8. Click Deploy

The http.request.uri.path variable preserves the path — so www.yourdomain.com/pricing correctly redirects to yourdomain.com/pricing.

Option B — Page Rules (older method, still works)

1. Go to Rules → Page Rules
2. Click Create Page Rule
3. URL: www.yourdomain.com/*
4. Setting: Forwarding URL
5. Status: 301 - Permanent Redirect
6. Destination: https://yourdomain.com/$1
7. Click Save and Deploy

The $1 captures whatever comes after www.yourdomain.com/ and appends it to the destination. www.yourdomain.com/pricing → yourdomain.com/pricing.

Step 2 — Check your SSL/TLS setting

A common cause of redirect loops: your SSL setting is too low.

1. Go to SSL/TLS → Overview
2. Make sure it's set to Full or Full (strict) — not Flexible

With Flexible SSL, Cloudflare connects to your origin over HTTP, which can cause loops when your origin also tries to redirect HTTP to HTTPS.

Step 3 — Verify the DNS entry for www

Make sure your www record exists in Cloudflare DNS and is proxied (orange cloud):

1. Go to DNS → Records
2. You should see a www CNAME or A record pointing to your domain or IP
3. The cloud icon should be orange (proxied) — if it's grey (DNS only), Cloudflare's redirect rules won't apply

If there's no www record, add one:

• Type: CNAME
• Name: www
• Target: yourdomain.com
• Proxy: on (orange cloud)

Testing the redirect

curl -I https://www.yourdomain.com

Look for HTTP/2 301 and location: https://yourdomain.com/ in the response headers. If you see a 200 instead, the redirect hasn't deployed yet or there's a DNS/proxy issue.

Common errors and gotchas

Redirect loop Almost always caused by Flexible SSL. Switch to Full or Full (strict) under SSL/TLS settings.

www.yourdomain.com not resolving at all No www DNS record exists. Add a proxied CNAME pointing www to your apex domain.

Path not preserved — redirect lands on homepage regardless of URL Using $1 in Page Rules but the wildcard isn't matching. Make sure your Page Rule URL is www.yourdomain.com/* (with the /* at the end). Alternatively, switch to Redirect Rules which use the expression syntax above.

Redirect not showing as 301 Cloudflare may cache the first response. Wait a few minutes and test in incognito to avoid browser cache. Or use curl which ignores browser caching.