My website used https protocol with no www. on all of its pages.
Then recently for a number of reason, I decided to switch to http://www. and only use https protocol for the admin login.

In .htaccess I added the following rule:
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

and in ReDJ I added this rule:
From ^https://
To http://{host}{path}{queryfull}
Skip /administrator/?
Case sensitive unchecked
Request Only unchecked
Decode URL checked

The reason I use Redj to redirect https skipping /administrator, is that if I try to accomplish the same thing in .htaccess (with: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator/ instead of: RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off) then I loose all icons in joomla administrator panel.

And if I do not skip /administrator, https login to the admin page fails (keeps spinning on a blank page) since www gets inserted in the url.

With these settings, all indexed links in Google seem to work well, whether non-www https links, non-www http links or www http links.

However, when I log in my admin page, I have to refresh the page to be able to get in the admin panel, otherwise the wheel keep spinning on the login box forever. Other pages inside the admin also do not refresh by themselves, such as the clearing the cache or other odd pages.

Another thing is that the website preview link doesn't work (keeps spinning on a blank page) from the admin panel since its URL automatically starts with https://www

Are there any better ways to tune these settings ?

Basically all admin related pages should stay on https:// with no www in the scheme, like it was originally.
While all other pages should be redirected to http://www

Hi Luigi,

Enforce SSL for administrator only is already activated in Joomla (I did that when I switched from using ssl for the whole site to using it only for the admin page)

If I do not use ReDJ rule, then all links under the form 'https:// + mywebsite.com' lead to blank spinning page, some with a 404 title.

With these two rules activated together (.htaccess + ReDJ), everything works pretty much as expected, except links under the form of 'https:// + www.mywebsite.com' plus some odd refreshing anomalities in Joomla admin which I mentionned above (another exemple in ReDJ redirect page: cliking on a 'case sensitive' icon from the main list of rules lead to the wheel spinning forever and the page not refreshing automatically, while clicking on the 'activating/deactivating' icon from the main list of rules work as expected).

I'm sending you a mail. Thanks!

Luigi, thank you so much for all your help with this.

I contacted my host provider and they found that these problems were caused because I had set the Live Site variable of Joomla to: http://www.mydomain.com

Yet the backend was set to being accessed securely and as such it tried to redirect to my site securely, and with the live site variable set to www. there was a redirect loop.

With the live site option disabled,both backend and frontend are correctly accessible and I didn't notice further problem.

Really sorry for troubling you unecessarily.