Redirect www to non-www in CloudFront

22 Jul 2025

If you want to redirect traffic from www.example.com to example.com using Amazon CloudFront, you’ll quickly discover CloudFront doesn’t support this out of the box.

The simple solution is to attach a Lambda@Edge function to the viewer-request event that detects requests to www. and issues a 301 redirect.

Here’s a quick example:

'use strict';

exports.handler = async (event) => {
  const request = event.Records[0].cf.request;
  const headers = request.headers;

  const hostHeader = headers['host'][0].value;
  if (hostHeader.startsWith('www.')) {
    const newHost = hostHeader.replace(/^www\./, '');
    const redirectUrl = `https://${newHost}${request.uri}`;
    return {
      status: '301',
      statusDescription: 'Moved Permanently',
      headers: {
        location: [{
          key: 'Location',
          value: redirectUrl,
        }],
      },
    };
  }

  return request;
};

✅ Key points:

Attach this Lambda@Edge function at the viewer-request event.
It ensures canonical URLs and avoids duplicate content issues.
Improves SEO by redirecting www traffic consistently to the apex domain.

IAnswerable

Redirect www to non-www in CloudFront