Business website: to www or not to www

[kiddingguy]

For a domain you can choose to have your website displayed (and keyed in) as www.xyz.com or xyz.com in the browser.

 

Who would an organization use/choose www or without the www in their domain?

What's better and more common? And what do customers usually type in? What's more recognizable etc etc.

 

I, myself, am more a pro-www, but if there are other arguments as to not use www I am more than willing to listen to these point of views.

And, of course, once chosen for a specific prefix you should hold on to it and be consistent and not use www and non-www prefixes and (re)directs.

[Descartes]

It's the same kind of argument as with how to put on a toilet paper roll.

 

Like you said, be consistent, and make sure both addresses work for the end user (have one redirect to the other) and you're golden.

[Danielx64]

IMO it better not to have the WWW. I redirect WWW to the main domain

[+John. Subscriber¹]

In this day and age it's purely athestic. As long as you have the www. as a redirect for the old schoolers, then it'll be fine.

[game_over]

I prefer the www.

 

However, it makes no difference, as you say, just choose one and make sure you stick to it. be sure to add BOTH of them in google search console and then pick your preferred site under the site settings.

 

Google see's www. and non-www as individual sites so you also need to be forcing to your chose method.

 

I prefer the www. it looks better and if someone types xyz.com you would have something in your .htaccess file to automatically redirect them to www.xyz.com.. so in theory it doesn't really matter if you have everything setup properly.

Edited August 15, 2016 by game_over

[Steven P. Administrators]

Well Edge decides that www isn't necessary, even if the site (like Neowin) is configured for www.  

 

 

Address bar open ^

 

 

Address bar closed ^

[madd-hatter]

26 minutes ago, Descartes said:

It's the same kind of argument as with how to put on a toilet paper roll.

This caught me off guard so I had to look into it... I've never met anyone who thought installing TP in an under orientation was rational but apparently it is a common argument. Hm...

[game_over]

3 minutes ago, Steven P. said:

Well Edge decides that www isn't necessary, even if the site (like Neowin) is configured for www.  

 

 

Address bar open ^

 

 

Address bar closed ^

Most do this, Safari shortens the rest of the URL ie.. /forums/... and only shows the main domain unless clicked to reveal the full url.

[pqt]

Both work equally as well, but be sure not to actually treat them equally. Google sees

• http://domain.com
• https://domain.com
• http://www.domain.com
• https://www.domain.com

as 4 completely separate entities, so whichever one you pick (I too am pro-www) you need to be adamant that everything is sourced from that location. The others should simply 301 to the target domain. But ultimately there's no real arguments either way for what's better or not. It's purely the choice of the webmaster.

[Ludacris1990]

I usually have my Servers configured to have the FQDN configured as primary adress.

This is primarily because I want to keep the subs free for anything else like dev or staging (webdevelopment), promotional stuff (e.g. winzone), organisational stuff (owa, email, calendar, intranet (and yes, I usually use a valid FQDN for an active directory as you can then register proper SSL certificates for intranet pages), etc.) 

But all in all, its just a preference. Both work, the subdomain www has been associated with website (and is even used as synonym for website in some countries (poland for example)). 

[svnO.o]

I'm pro-www as well though I agree that it is completely up to your preference!

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

I never understood why www as standard has been around so long, it's not as if you would use the domain without www for something else then the main website...

Main reason why I don't like it is because it's more letters to type  

 

Thanks for reminding me about www, I almost forgot to set a dns redirect on a site I'm working on.

[Circaflex]

I rarely type out a full address anyways, I usually type nameofsite and then crtl+enter to finish it.

[DevTech]

On 8/19/2016 at 7:45 PM, Seahorsepip said:

I never understood why www as standard has been around so long, it's not as if you would use the domain without www for something else then the main website...

Main reason why I don't like it is because it's more letters to type  

 

Thanks for reminding me about www, I almost forgot to set a dns redirect on a site I'm working on.

It is just internet history.

 

The internet existed before HTML and web pages and all the major companies would have a domain like IBM.com where you would actually connect to it via several protocols using a terminal interface, such as ftp.ibm.com with the main top level address often defaulting to the Golpher Protocol.

 

So when the new fangled World Wide Web of interconnected HTML documents came along, the logical thing was www.ibm.com

 

It didn't take long before responsibility for corporate WWW was handed over to the marketing drones at each company who often to this day think that WWW is a technical requirement!

 

 

[Anibal P]

WWW is going to die off as the primary way of accessing a site

Main reason, mobile, the less you have to type on a screen the better off you are, and as people switch to only mobile and tablets with the random laptop thrown in sites that are "harder" to type in will fade into obscurity, just a matter of time, those of us using a desktop with a high res screen or more are in the minority these days

[Shiranui]

What I hate are sites that only use one or the other.