Can we finally get rid of the www?
My day job is in corporate advertising doing television and radio ads. When working on a 30 second ad, a lot of the time the copy is too long and you need to make cuts and edits. In the mid 2000’s whenever we worked on an advertisement that had a website in it and needed to make such cuts, I would always suggest dropping the HTTP from the commercial to save some time. Unfortunately most of the time there would be an older client that didn’t quite understand the Internet and would want to keep the HTTP thinking no one would understand it was a website without it.
Of course now in 2016 people have long lost and forgotten the HTTP prefix. When was the last time you heard it or typed it in yourself?
However in those same meetings today when we need to cut copy for time clients are still hesitant to drop the www prefix from their web address. They still feel that people won’t understand it’s a website if they just say branddomain.com and insist on it being www.branddomain.com.
Of course people will still realize it’s a website without the www and I don’t think anyone has even typed www in the last 10 years. So I have to ask……
Why Have We Not Got Rid of WWW
We don’t need it. We don’t type it. Why do we even need to see it?
If you are starting out a new website you should begin the process with a non www site. If you currently have a website that uses www, change it to a non www. If you are changing it, just make sure you use 301 redirects to let Google know the pages have moved or you will lose all your link building efforts.
How To Change Your WWW Site To Non WWW Using Htaccess
It’s easy to change from a www to a non www site using .htaccess. Simply go to your hosting root access for the website and open your htaccess file. There you will want to insert the following code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
If you don’t have a .htaccess file you can create one and place the code in it. Make sure you test it by typing in www.mydomain.com into your web browser. If the url changes to mydomain.com when the site loads, congratulations, you are now a non www website and ready for the modern age.
Plus don’t url’s look a lot prettier without that ugly www preceding them?
Can’t I Have Both WWW and Non WWW To Be Safe?
No. You can’t. If your website has pages served for both www and non www url’s Google and other search engines will regard them as duplicate content. To a search engine www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com are two separate pages. If you have the same information on both, they get confused since they see the same content on two pages and start thinking your site might be spam. It is considered best practices to choose just 1 page or your rankings in the SERPS can be harmed.
So I ask, please join me in a revolution to abandon the www prefix forever. Will you join?
