Why does my url not have a www

Without a redirect, search engines will crawl both yoursite. A redirect will tell search engines to ignore one of the sites and to give all of the ranking authority to the intended website.

You might also need WWW if you use cookies for your website. Without WWW. Since this cookie applies to the main domain, it will also apply to whatever subdomains they access as well. In other words, the cookie will not be able to distinguish between blog. This means it will make it difficult for you to track what your visitors are doing when they come to your site. Just keep in mind that this method is not as reliable as redirects. Google treats canonicals as recommendations and not instructions, and as a result, both website versions may get indexed.

If your preferred version is www. With WordPress 2. Tags will either point to www or non www versions of your website depending on the one you specified as your WordPress Address URL under the general settings of WordPress. So, a user trying to access example.

So, if you decided to keep www, make sure all your Sitemap URLs and internal links are www. In turn, Google will appreciate your consistency and reward you with better rankings. To avoid such situations, you can systematically run a website audit. To check if everything is set up properly on your website, you can start your day free trial and the system will automatically audit your website as soon as you add your project to the platform.

At first sight, the non-www URL looks neater and more appealing. It also rolls off the tongue much easier. This is actually what most people do when saying a website name out loud. So why not skip it when choosing the canonical version of your website name? It really makes sense to choose non-www for the sake of branding. But before doing so, there are some technical restrictions you need to consider. These limitations are the reason why Internet giants stick to www.

It is done using an A-type record , and the DNS record looks like this. Instead, they rely on content delivery networks CDN to quickly and securely deliver content to millions of their users. And here come the technical limitations. So, if you add both, the A-type record pointing to the IP address will be ignored, violating the first rule.

But relying on the workarounds will limit your choice of DNS providers and you may also face the problem of hindered user experience because of users being routed to a far-away CDN node.

In addition to DNS limitations, choosing a root domain as canonical brings up the cookies issue. A server isn't necessarily a physical machine: several servers can reside on the same physical machine.

Or, one server can be handled by several machines, cooperating to produce the answer or balancing the load of the requests between them. The key point is that semantically one domain name represents one single server. So, choose one of your domains as your canonical one! There are two techniques below to allow the non-canonical domain to work still. In this case, you need to configure the server receiving the HTTP requests which is most likely the same for www and non-www URLs to respond with an adequate HTTP response to any request to the non-canonical domain.

This will redirect the browser trying to access the non-canonical URLs to their canonical equivalent. Why do some Web sites include www in the URL while others don't? Web Naming and Addressing Overview. Cite This! Try Our Sudoku Puzzles! More Web Basics.