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Vercel

Vercel redirect chains: the Redirect to dropdown

Vercel redirects www automatically even with no rule configured. The domain redirect, the project redirects, and how to count the hops.

Vercel may redirect www to the project domain automatically, while a domain "Redirect to" setting and framework or vercel.json redirects can add more hops. Inspect all three layers, keep one rule for each transition, remove the duplicates, redeploy if code changed, and test every host and protocol variant again.

Why Vercel does this

Vercel adds a redirect even when you never configured one: "If a user visits your domain with or without the \"www\" subdomain prefix, we will attempt to redirect automatically. You might still want to add this redirect explicitly." The configured layer is the domain redirect: "You can add domain redirects from the Domains section in the sidebar", via "Use the \"Redirect to\" dropdown to select the domain you want to redirect to", for example "redirect a www subdomain to an apex domain". Their recommendation is "using the www subdomain as your primary domain, with a redirect from the non-www domain to it". A third layer exists: "You can also add redirects programmatically using frameworks and Vercel Functions."

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How to fix it

  1. Open Project Settings, then Domains, and list every domain attached to the project.
  2. Check each domain's Edit panel for a "Redirect to" target; that redirect happens before anything your code does.
  3. Count the layers: the automatic www redirect, the domain redirect, and any project-level redirects in vercel.json or framework config.
  4. Collapse to one hop: point the non-preferred domain directly at the preferred one and remove project redirects that repeat it.
  5. Re-check the URL with the free redirect checker below and count the hops.

Why it happens again

Domains get added during a launch and redirects configured for one campaign, then the project outlives all of it. The automatic www redirect runs even when nobody remembers enabling anything, so a domain-level redirect plus a project redirect for the same domain is two hops that each look intentional in a different dashboard.

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Catching it next time

Fixing it once is the easy half. The setting that caused this can be changed again by anyone with access, and the page will keep returning 200 while it happens.

Other ways Vercel loses pages

A broken or chained redirect, on other platforms

Sources

Every claim about Vercel above is from their own documentation, read on 2026-08-30. Platforms change their settings; if one of these is out of date, their page wins and we would like to know.