Redirecting www to non-www, correctly

Both work. What harms a site is serving the same content at both addresses, or redirecting through two or three hops before arriving. Choose one, send everything else to it in a single redirect, and be done.

Nginx

# a small server block whose only job is the redirect
server {
    listen 80;
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name www.example.com;
    ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
    return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}

Apache and LiteSpeed

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

One hop, not three

A common accident is http://www redirecting to https://www, then to https://example.com. Every hop is a full round trip. Do it in one.

curl -sSIL https://www.example.com/page | grep -E '^HTTP|^location'

Read that output: you want exactly one 301 and then a 200. Two 301s means there is a redirect to remove.

Then make the site agree

• The site URL setting in your application.
• The canonical tag on every page.
• The sitemap.
• Anything hard-coded in the content.