The first decisions you make when creating a website are very important. Choosing a purpose for the site, choosing a server, choosing a WordPress theme – these are very important things. You may also need to choose how to monetize the website, which monetization model works best for you, and many other things that are also very important.
That’s why it’s so important to be able to separate those important decisions from those that don’t really matter. The “www and non-www” dichotomy is a great example of what people overestimate, although there are some nuances to the dichotomy.
So, let’s dig! In this article we will explain:
People are partially familiar with the letters www because they form the acronym for World Wide Web, this thing you visit when reading articles online. However, when you put these three words in such a domain name www.example.comthey become important because www becomes the subdomain on the domain you are visiting.
Www is one of the most popular and widely used subdomains, but it is not the only one. You can come across many websites that have “mail” and “blog” as subdomains. Mobile websites usually have the subdomain “m”, test websites have “test” and forums can have “forum”. The www, in this case, is exactly the same as any of these subdomains.
When you ask the difference between www and non-www URLs, you’re actually asking what the difference is between having a subdomain on your domain. For example, we know it doesn’t affect your SEO in any way. Google shouldn’t care if you use it www.example.com or example.com.
There is a slight difference between the two:
That is all. All the differences are easily fixed – even the problem with cookies can be solved by storing the static content in a separate domain. Whichever you choose, you probably won’t notice a difference.
For the most part, it doesn’t matter which one you choose because even problems you may encounter have easy fixes. There’s also no reason why you can’t have both. But there is a catch – You should choose one for the main version of the website and stick with it.
Don’t confuse search engines with two versions of your website that you treat as the same, making it hard to see which is the standard version. Use Add an element to the head of your pages to let search engines know which page should be considered canonical.
Speaking of canonical versions – when you decide on the version that will be your main version, be sure to set up 301 redirects that will bring any user trying to visit the non-canonical version to the canonical version.
Let’s wrap it up!
For the most part, it doesn’t make a big difference if you choose a www or non-www address for your website. Small advantages that come with www melt thanks to workarounds that are not too difficult to implement. After all, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have both.
The important thing is that once you choose which is the major version, you treat it as the major version consistently. That’s where setting up redirects and adding link elements comes in – they help browsers understand which version is the major or standard version.
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