Permalinks do not include www subdomain

Question

I recently migrated a website which was both hosted with and without www subdomain. I configured the .htaccess to always redirect to www:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[^.]+\.[^.]+$
RewriteCond %{HTTPS}s ^on(s)|
RewriteRule ^ http%1://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Also the site address is now configured to use www:

And the permalinks also seem to use to www subdomain:

However, if I configure a slug for a page as bellow and try to access the page using the post name, the server will send a 301 redirect (GET www.example.com/example-post -> 301 with location https://example.com/example-slug which will redirect again to https://www.example.com/example-slug due to the .htaccess config). Also, all guids inside the database do not contain the www.

Is there a way to prevent these unnecessary redirects? My SEO analysis tool is complaining about redirection chains.

Answer 1

Settings in .htaccess tell the server how to handle requests. Since the site previously allowed both www and non-www URLs, you'll want to keep your .htaccess in place, so old links redirect properly. However, that doesn't tell WP that it's now living in the www subdomain; it stores URLs in many places.

You can ignore the GUIDs - they're just unique IDs - but you can run a search and replace script or plugin to update all the other URLs in the database.

If you have WP CLI enabled, the command is

wp search-replace 'https://example.com' 'https://www.example.com'

If not, there are also database migration plugins available that will update all the URLs and re-serialize them properly in the database.