CNAME vs A Record for WWW - with 301 Redirects

Question

I am using a 301 redirect plugin: Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin and my site's URL is http://example.com <-- notice no www. This works great for the following scenario:

User types: example.com/campaign

My redirect of /campaign/ => http://example.com/longer-campaign-page-slug works. Awesome. However, this next scenario does not work:

User types: www.example.com/campaign

WordPress either 404s or tries to redirect to the most closely-named post (this is default behavior of WordPress as far as I can tell). Example, user lands at http://example.com/campaign-from-last-month because it is similarly named.

I tried adding this to .htaccess but it did nothing:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Keep in mind, regular requests to actual pages work. For example: http://www.example.com/super/awesome/slug/path will successfully land to http://example.com/super/awesome/slug/path.

The www record is a CNAME to the A record. Would having both of these be their own A record (to same IP) improve the situation? Or is there another solution I'm missing?

Answer 1

Figured it out. Put that before WordPress rewrite.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>