Dealing with WWW

When you're finishing up a new site or revisiting an old one, it's a smart choice to make sure your URL is loaded the same way, with or without the www record.

In some cases, www.domain.com serves different content than domain.com. However, for a vast majority of sites users get the same content either way, so it's important to setup your site so that there is a consistent URL that visitors' and search engine crawlers see. It's an easy fix…

You need to have an .htaccess file, and have the mod_rewrite engine turned on:

RewriteEngine On

Then, it's just two lines to make your site either add www:

# Add WWW
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Or, to drop it like I've done on my own site:

# Remove WWW
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That's it! Depending on which version you choose, visitors and crawlers will be automatically redirected to the correct setting of your domain.