Query strings in WordPress URLs

Your Managed WordPress account removes known tracking query strings (such as utm_*) from the page your visitors load if they encounter server-side redirects. Examples of server-side redirects include:

• Forcing visitors to load your website with or without the "www" subdomain
• 301 redirects

With Managed WordPress, query strings get removed most frequently because website owners link to a version of their site that's not using the "www" properly.

Example

If you set up your Managed WordPress account as www.coolexample.com, and then linked visitors to, coolexample.com?utm_medium=Facebook (without the leading "www"), there's a server-side redirect to www.coolexample.com.

During that redirect, the query string ("?utm_medium=Facebook") gets removed, and the visitor loads the page www.coolexample.com.

Resolving Query String Issues

You can resolve this issue by consistently linking to your domain name with or without the "www."

If you'd like to see which version your Managed WordPress account uses or change it, see Change my primary domain name.

Technical Information

This occurs because of the way Managed WordPress caches your website's content. We cache your website's pages based on their URLs and exclude URLs with known tracking query strings.

When visitors encounter a server-side redirect, they load a page we have cached, which does not include the query string in the URL, thereby removing it.

However, when visitors load the page without encountering a server-side redirect, there are no issues and the query string remains intact.