Fresh install redirects to www, breaking page loads

I set up a new Wordpress site, wanderandponder.com, on DigitalOcean yesterday. It was on a droplet that also ran several other Wordpress sites, without conflict. However, when accessing the domain, it inexplicably redirects to www.wanderandponder.com, which displays a Namecheap domain parking page. Trying to load any specific page or admin panel returns ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE.

I spun up a fresh droplet and set up a new LAMP stack and Wordpress install, just to encounter the same error.

On Namecheap, I set up custom DNS to point to ns1/ns2/ns3.digitalocean.com. On Digital Ocean, I have the DNS set up with three NS records pointing to ns1/ns2/ns3.digitalocean.com, one A record pointing to the server IP, and one CNAME record directing www.wanderandponder.com to wanderandponder.com.

Nothing is set in .htaccess, rewrites are allowed, nothing else is customized at this point. Definitely scratching my head over this, never encountered a "forced www" issue before, and nothing out of the ordinary is showing in DNS lookups

Topic dns url-rewriting htaccess redirect Wordpress

Category Web

1
answered at

The way to pinpoint the specific cause of the problem you should configure your OS's localhosts file to point the domain directly to the DO server. (don't forget to use different browser or close and open the one you work with as they usually cache DNS results).

If in this configuration you are still getting redirections, the problem is with your web server/wordpress setup, but if thing work, you have some problem with DNS configuration somewhere.

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