I have a question about the impact of a root domain redirect on site-wide redirects and slugs.

[mollykathariner_ms]

I have a question about the impact (if any) of site-wide redirects for DNS/hosting change purposes.

I am preparing to redirect the domain for a site I manage from https://siteImanage.com to https://www.siteImanage.com. Traffic to the site currently redirects in reverse, from https://www.siteImanage.com to https://siteImanage.com.

Based on my research, I understand that making this change should not affect the site’s excellent SEO as long as my canonical tags are updated and a 301 redirect is in place. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a potential consequence of this switch I’m not considering. Because this redirect lives at the root of all the site’s slugs and existing redirects, will it technically produce a redirect chain or a redirect loop? If it does, is that problematic?

Thanks for your input!

[Xiano]

Depending upon how you've set up your previous redirects, it could be a problem, but I suspect you'll be fine.

In my experience, a small redirect chain won't cause a massive issue and unless you already have some multi-step redirects going on, your new plan won't put you at risk of more than two steps anyway. Obviously, a loop would cause serious issues, but I don't think you are at risk of this.

Your redirects should be relative to absolute, i.e. /oldpage to https://siteImanage.com/newpage. In this case, you would just need to update your absolute paths to the new url. If you ensure these are matched first, then you would only have one redirect regardless of whether the client hits the www or non-www domain. If the full domain redirect is matched first, you'll end up for two steps for those people hitting only pages on the old domain

If your redirects are matching based on relative links and redirecting to relative urls (as some plugins do), i.e. /oldpage redirects to /newpage, then you'll end up with a two-step process if someone follows an old link; First, the site will redirect from non-www to www, and then it will redirect to the correct page.

If you have redirects such as "https://siteImanage.com/oldpage" redirecting to "https://siteImanage.com/newpage" then you would create a two-step process again, first to the new page and then to the new domain. Of course, your redirects wouldn't work on the new domain as they wouldn't match, which may or may not be a problem for you.