Should I use WWW or not?

[CTXMedia]

I've bought three XF licenses, but before I launch the sites I wondered whether it is still thought of a common practice to include the "www" in the URL?

E.g; www.geekschat.net ... or ... geekschat.net ?

I can alias the other flavours of the URL in Apache, and use mod_rewrite to force them onto a specific URL at the point of entry, but I just wondered if the majority of people still think in terms of "www" for web site addresses, or if we've moved forward far enough for people to naturally drop the "www" and just go straight for the domain name?

Any thoughts on this?

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Ati]

I personally don't like using the "www" tag, but most of my users cannot imagine a webpage without it.

 

[Paul B]

Most savvy people seem to understand why www is no longer required.

That just leaves the other 99.99% of internet users.

 

[Luke F]

Normally I force www off, but for some reason .co.uk domains look weird to me without it, so it's forced on on my forum.

Though as long as you redirect from one to the other, it doesn't really matter.

 

[Paul B]

Won't work on my domain due to some limitation set by the host

Otherwise I would have removed it.

 

[Sadik B]

Doesn't really matter. Whichever you choose make sure you redirect the other one to it.

 

[Caelum]

Yeah, doesn't really matter, but personally I prefer dropping the www part.

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

I've bought three XF licenses, but before I launch the sites I wondered whether it is still thought of a common practice to include the "www" in the URL?

E.g; www.geekschat.net ... or ... geekschat.net ?

I can alias the other flavours of the URL in Apache, and use mod_rewrite to force them onto a specific URL at the point of entry, but I just wondered if the majority of people still think in terms of "www" for web site addresses, or if we've moved forward far enough for people to naturally drop the "www" and just go straight for the domain name?

Any thoughts on this?

Cheers,
Shaun

I don't use it anymore... so 90's ....
Keep the URL short. Save 4 bytes per request (at least). Yay.

DO redirect from www to the regular one, though Do not have the users that type www.something.com land on an empty page

 

[CBI Web]

I haven't used www since... oh wow I don't remember! Most of the 2000's anyway. It simply hasn't been necessary for years, and Google can tell you why. I'm tired of explaining it to people.

 

[Dean]

If I were to do it again it would be without the www. but 99+% of the links to my forum from other sites have the www. in it, so I redirect everything to the www.

 

[x4rl]

www. is so old get this the times.. delete that ****
I force it off also >.> makes the domain longer imo which I hate

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.animelon\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://animelon.com/$1 [R=301,L]

 

[CTXMedia]

Well I've found just one technical reason for using WWW: (The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Since, currently, only a subdomain can be cname'ed the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root.)

However I'm not at the load balancing stage yet ... lol ... so I'll got with the shorter form and redirect.

Thanks,
Shaun

 

[Ati]

You can do loadbalancing without a cname, too. Just add all your IP addresses to the same domainname, and there you go. See "google.com" for example.

 

[CTXMedia]

Thanks - good to know when the time comes for my forums to need load balancing ... lol (might be waiting a little while ... )

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Onimua]

I've dropped the prefix on my site as well, and will do so for future projects too. I do admit it bugged me for a while not seeing it, but I got used to it.

 

[Peggy]

You can get to my site with or without the www.

 

[gib]

go naked, better without the www

 

[Tomble]

I used to prefer without but for most of my domains I feel it looks better with it, not sure why. However either lets people get on my site so it's really aesthetic taste only. I just feel that it looks better on Google with it. Might consider changing it back though... undecided.

 

[Carlos]

Honestly, I leave the www. alone.

Mostly because if someone typed carlosx360.com, it would work anyway.

But google TRUSTS sites with www. on them. In fact, some sites have www2 or www3 or https://domain here.

 

[yoghurtfarmer]

On a related note, if you wonder if you should use example.org or www.example.org for your home page, consider the cookie impact. Omitting www leaves you no choice but to write cookies to *.example.org, so for performance reasons it's best to use the www subdomain and write the cookies to that subdomain.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cookie_free