How Your Site Could Handle Different Requests

1. Both www and non-www URLs work.
2. If your visitor enters www.example.com, they will be redirected to example.com
3. If the visitor enters example.com, they will be redirected to www.example.com
4. Or it could be broken!

www and Non-www Work

An example of a site that does this would be TechCrunch. Both the www version and the non-www version work without any redirects.

This is a usable practice. Visitors don’t have to worry about being redirected or typing in the wrong address prefix. However, some search engines see the www as a subdomain. If a blog links to www.techcrunch.com and another one links to techcrunch.com, they are counted as links to two separate sites, which leads to a lower search engine rank. This can severely hurt TechCrunch’s SEO score, although that probably isn’t an issue for them as the #2 most popular Technorati blog.

Redirect to non-www

Digg.com redirects its www-inclined visitors to the non-www equivalent. The readability of the URL is improved because the visitor isn’t distracted by the unnecessary www.

Bonus points: if you have information in the URL (say you’re trying to view the top stories over the last 24 hours), using the www prefix doesn’t delete that information and leave you confused and at their homepage. Check out what happens when you go to their top stories with www. You’ll never even notice the difference.

Redirect to www

Amazon.com is the most popular online retailer and they use this method. When you go to http://amazon.com, you are quickly redirected to http://www.amazon.com. This doesn’t make a difference from a usability standpoint once you consider their audience. Amazon attracts more people that aren’t as technologically-inclined as Digg users. Seeing the www missing from the URL might confuse them to the point of thinking something is broken with Amazon and abandon whatever shopping they were doing. This is the worst case scenario, but none the less, a valid consideration. Amazon made the right choice when it came to which www method to use.

Bonus points for Amazon: if you get a bit too trigger happy with your w’s, Amazon is right there to save you. If you type in wwww.amazon.com, you are still redirected successfully to Amazon’s homepage. This reinforces trust in the Amazon brand because they will always have your back. From a business perspective, this is an excellent idea because Amazon wants to get you looking at products faster by avoiding a potentially confusing error from a simple typo.

URL Was Broked

If your site only works with www.yoursite.com, you are going to run into trouble when a power user comes along, someone who knows that the www is now a pointless exercise. A visitor comes along, doesn’t type the www, and then is presented with a “Server Not Found” error or a 404 page. They will think something is wrong and most likely leave.

Please do not let this happen to your visitors. Accept any variation of URL your visitor can throw at you.

How To Do It Right

The ideal solution for the www problem is to redirect all requests to a non-www address as soon as the visitor gets to the site. During the redirection, the visitor should not lose any valuable URL information either. It should preserve the visitor’s original request, like the Digg example above. Redirect pages are definitely not invited to the party (”wait here for 5 second while we bore the hell out of you”). This allows for usability improvements and higher SEO scores for certain search engines.

Truthfully, it doesn’t matter much whether you use option 2 or 3. It’s a personal preference and I like keeping www out of all the fun!

The only step to redirecting your visitors is to put the following in your .htaccess file and changing example.com to your domain:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]]

The first bit is turning on Apache’s ability to redirect certain URLs. The 3rd line is saying “for URLs that begin with a www” and the 4th “permanently redirect to a non-www version of the URL.” The 301 redirect (note the R=301) makes sure search engines and browsers understand that this is a permanent redirection. Copying and pasting 4 lines into your .htaccess file is an easy way to instantly improve the usability and SEO of your site.