If you’ve recently migrated your WordPress site to Kinsta and it mysteriously starts redirecting to yourdomain.wpenginepowered.com, you’re not alone — and you’re not hacked. In my case, after moving yourdomain.com from WP Engine to Kinsta, I ran into exactly this problem. Everything looked fine, but the redirect persisted. Here’s the full story and how to fix it in minutes.

The Setup: A Simple Migration (or So I Thought)

I had been hosting my site on WP Engine, but decided to upgrade to Kinsta for better performance and scalability.

Here’s what I did:

  • Pointed my A record to Kinsta’s IP.
  • Added the domain to MyKinsta’s dashboard.
  • Set www.yourdomain.com as the primary domain.
  • Verified the domain — Kinsta marked it as “✅ Domain Live”.

So far, so good.

The Issue: The Dreaded Redirect

But when I visited my domain in the browser, I was instantly redirected to:

https://yourdomain.wpenginepowered.com

It even happened in incognito mode. After checking on httpstatus.io I saw a 301 Moved Permanently response pointing to the .wpenginepowered.com domain. That’s when I knew something weird was going on.

The Real Culprit: WP Engine’s Cloudflare Proxy Still Had My Domain

After some digging (and a helpful Kinsta support chat), the problem became clear:

✅ I had previously hosted the same domain on WP Engine.
✅ WP Engine uses Cloudflare Enterprise, just like Kinsta does.
✅ My domain was still registered inside my WP Engine account.

So even though my DNS pointed to Kinsta, WP Engine’s Cloudflare proxy was still intercepting the request. And since it saw the domain as “misrouted,” it forwarded traffic to its internal fallback address — wpenginepowered.com.

The Fix: Remove the Domain from WP Engine and Let Kinsta Take Over

Here’s the step-by-step fix:

  1. Log into your WP Engine dashboard.
  2. Go to Sites → Your Site → Domains.
  3. Remove both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com from WP Engine.
  4. Head back to Kinsta, and (if needed) ask their support to re-provision your domain on their Cloudflare network.
  5. Clear all caches: browser, Kinsta, and Cloudflare (if you’re using your own account).

You should now see a 200 OK response — no redirect.

How I Verified the Fix

Once Kinsta re-mapped the domain to their Cloudflare setup, I saw:

  • curl returned 200 OK with no redirect.
  • DNS propagation was clean via whatsmydns.net.
  • My browser loaded the correct Kinsta-hosted version of the site.
  • The wpenginepowered.com redirect was completely gone.

Post-Migration Checklist to Avoid This Issue

If you’re switching hosts and both old/new providers use Cloudflare Enterprise, do this:

  • ✅ Remove your domain from the old host before changing DNS.
  • ✅ Add and verify the domain in your new host’s dashboard (Kinsta, in my case).
  • ✅ Ensure Site URL and WordPress Address in WordPress settings match the new domain.
  • ✅ Clear any hardcoded values in wp-config.php like WP_HOME or WP_SITEURL.
  • ✅ Purge all caches.
  • ✅ Use curl or whatsmydns.net to verify routing and propagation.

Final Thoughts

This wasn’t a typical DNS or WordPress issue — it was an edge-network conflict caused by both WP Engine and Kinsta using Cloudflare Enterprise, and my domain being attached to both at the same time.

Thankfully, it was an easy fix once I identified the cause.

So if you’re seeing your domain redirect to wpenginepowered.com, don’t panic — just detach it from WP Engine and let your new host (like Kinsta) handle the routing.

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