A store doing canonical redirects at origin, costing every visitor a round trip

A store doing canonical redirects at origin, costing every visitor a round trip

A home-goods retailer redirected naked-domain and http traffic to https://www at the application layer. Every first-time visitor from a Google result hit the origin in Phoenix just to receive a 301, then came back for the real page — two full round trips before any content. From Sydney that was 640ms wasted before the page even started loading.

The redirect logic lived 12,000km from half the audience.

What we changed: moved the canonical redirect to an edge rule. The 301 now issued from the nearest POP in under 15ms, and the origin never saw redirect traffic at all.

Time-to-first-byte for redirected visitors in Sydney dropped from 640ms to 14ms. Origin request volume fell 18% just from shedding redirect hits. Google's reported page-load for the landing template improved enough to nudge rankings on two head terms.

The number that mattered: redirect TTFB 640ms to 14ms.