poll WWW vs non-WWW - Which is better for new gTLDs?

Actually I usually specify https:// unless I _know_ they don't have secure already, even if no transactions etc. I prefer https just because of cookies etc. But anyway

Interesting thread. I feel I have done plenty of research on this and have always used WWW. as a default. My perceived benefits are:

1. WWW is an extra keyword which has a search benefit. You need to have a good reason to give that up.
2. As previously mentioned a LOT of people outside the web world do not identify with a website unless WWW is used. Certainly the comprehension level is improving, but not at a rate to justify discounting this factor.
3. Further to that, WWW. is much more pleasant visually than HTTP://. Both can be used interchangeably to clearly identify that the following text is a website URL. This is even more relevant now with the new extensions as nobody will recognise a URL without prompting.

I only lean towards non-WWW if the goal of the domain is to be short; such as URL shorteners and short tech-related domains (where the audience understands WWW).

Finally I think the weighting of a URL is relevant, eg. www.domain.com looks OK because it has 3L at each end. www.name.domains looks much more awkward. I think that will probably have an impact on how WWW is used moving forward, even for me.

RU said:

Are you thinking the www looks familiar?

Click to expand...

It's more just personal preference over familiarity. But, I think part of why it's my personal preference is because it's so familiar... If that makes any sense, lol.

It doesn't matter how people type it in, though. Both versions will take you to the same place. However, Google Webmaster Tools prefers that you specify one version. Not to mention, it's good to focus on one version when building incoming links.

Which one you use doesn't matter. Whichever you choose, always redirect the other to it with a permanent redirect (so It doesn't create duplicate content or split your inbound link equity.)

For good measure tell Google via Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) which is your preferred version, but the redirect is more important.

JRayers said:

1. Further to that, WWW. is much more pleasant visually than HTTP://. Both can be used interchangeably to clearly identify that the following text is a website URL.

Click to expand...

They're not interchangeable - http (or https) is a protocol, www is a subdomain. Http:// is implied even if you don't type it.

FPForum said:

It's more just personal preference over familiarity. But, I think part of why it's my personal preference is because it's so familiar... If that makes any sense, lol.

It doesn't matter how people type it in, though. Both versions will take you to the same place. However, Google Webmaster Tools prefers that you specify one version. Not to mention, it's good to focus on one version when building incoming links.

Click to expand...

Both versions only take you to the same place when the server is configured to do so. You should have one specifically redirect to the other.

-=-
Historically when buying an SSL cert for a single domain, it was good for one domain. Fortunately now, most CAs will issue the certificate to be good for both the domain with and without the www. But some still don't, so be careful when buying a cert.

enlytend said:

Which one you use doesn't matter. Whichever you choose, always redirect the other to it with a permanent redirect (so It doesn't create duplicate content or split your inbound link equity.)

For good measure tell Google via Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) which is your preferred version, but the redirect is more important.


They're not interchangeable - http (or https) is a protocol, www is a subdomain. Http:// is implied even if you don't type it.

Click to expand...

Not implied, it is browser compensating by guessing that http is what you want.

And if you are referencing a local web server (where there may not even be a dot in the url), some browsers will instead guess that you want to do a search.

Meant to say "assumed" (by browsers)

enlytend said:

They're not interchangeable - http (or https) is a protocol, www is a subdomain. Http:// is implied even if you don't type it.

Click to expand...

Agreed. I meant they are interchangeable in the sense that they are cues to a layman that what follows is a URL.

So on your business card (or printed media) you have the choice of:


The latter is much cleaner in my opinion.

Or http://www.mybusiness.tld

Actually as long as you have the 301 redirect in place, use whichever you like on the business card.

JRayers said:

Agreed. I meant they are interchangeable in the sense that they are cues to a layman that what follows is a URL.

So on your business card (or printed media) you have the choice of:

http://mybusiness.com

www.mybusiness.com​

The latter is much cleaner in my opinion.

Click to expand...

That is true.

JRayers said:

Interesting thread. I feel I have done plenty of research on this and have always used WWW. as a default. My perceived benefits are:

1. WWW is an extra keyword which has a search benefit. You need to have a good reason to give that up.
2. As previously mentioned a LOT of people outside the web world do not identify with a website unless WWW is used. Certainly the comprehension level is improving, but not at a rate to justify discounting this factor.
3. Further to that, WWW. is much more pleasant visually than HTTP://. Both can be used interchangeably to clearly identify that the following text is a website URL. This is even more relevant now with the new extensions as nobody will recognise a URL without prompting.

I only lean towards non-WWW if the goal of the domain is to be short; such as URL shorteners and short tech-related domains (where the audience understands WWW).

Finally I think the weighting of a URL is relevant, eg. www.domain.com looks OK because it has 3L at each end. www.name.domains looks much more awkward. I think that will probably have an impact on how WWW is used moving forward, even for me.

Click to expand...

www.names.sale - with 4L looks awkward? I think to go with https://names.sale, but 'www' give me additional 480 monthly searches in Google.

My name is com.sale
So I chose the non-www

RU said:

but 'www' give me additional 480 monthly searches in Google.

Click to expand...

That's misleading because it's a navigational query. People who type "www" into a search are looking for a specific site. If it isn't yours, they won't click.

Also, you need to tell browsers https or they assume you want http. Though if you want to allow only https on your site, you should redirect http traffic to force it..

RU said:

www.names.sale - with 4L looks awkward?

Click to expand...

I don't think the balance there looks too bad. I reckon I would personally go with WWW for that domain.

mhdoc said:

www actually designates a subdomain. Your domain name with or without it can/could be seen as two separate sites. There used to be a lot of issues with Google ranking each version independently of each other. These days I believe most systems either get setup to redirect from one to the other and/or Googlebot is smart enough to figure it out.

I don't really understand all this but this article may help if you are interested.

Click to expand...

This pretty much sums it up. I do think www.domainname.com looks better and resonates with customers better, but I have had much trouble with using www. infront of my domain names to the point where I don't use it at all now. Mainly, scripting and redirect errors, indexing problems and so on.

In all honesty, I think there will be a lot of confusion with the new gTLDs with-out the www out front because people might not even know if "website.whatever" is a domain name at all.

enterscope said:

This pretty much sums it up. I do think www.domainname.com looks better and resonates with customers better, but I have had much trouble with using www. infront of my domain names to the point where I don't use it at all now. Mainly, scripting and redirect errors, indexing problems and so on.

In all honesty, I think there will be a lot of confusion with the new gTLDs with-out the www out front because people might not even know if "website.whatever" is a domain name at all.

Click to expand...

Indeed, some forum software that automatically creates links will do so without the www on .com etc. but either will not at all with ngTLDs or only with there is a www. at the beginning (or http:// at the beginning)

Really what they should do, imho, is look at every string and if it could be a URL, do a simple A lookup to see if it is a valid domain and then link it. But that requires a lot of DNS queries (can be reduced by caching the results as boolean and only checking if not in cache)

Great topic...

When developing sites I prefer not to use the www. I use .htaccess to resolve any www requests to the non-www version. I mainly do this because it prompts users to create cleaner anchor tags. In my experience, if you leave out the www, the user will leave out the extension as well.

This is good for SEO, as it can diversify your backlink profile anchors; which will help rank your site better for the keywords.

However, with the new extensions you almost have to use the www version, because people have no idea that it is a web address without it.

Booking.com had to mess it up for everyone with their inane booking.yeah commercial. If you try to go to Booking.Yeah your browser will forward you to a search engine (google) for a search for the term. It's not a domain, but how were people supposed to know that.

The only way people know that areyou.sexy is a real domain is if the www is in front of it.

They are familiar with that formatting, and understand that they can go online and access it.

Alice Wonder Miscreations said:

I don't use www, I have www redirect to the domain without it. The historic reasons why it was sometimes necessary really no longer exist (distinguish the web server from ftp etc. services).

Click to expand...

Would agree with historic reasons but we're dealing with end-users here and while some are tech savvy most are simply consumers who need to be "assisted" in the right direction...although an established company like Walmart or Microsoft already have an established brand so less of an issue...

RU said:

www.names.sale - with 4L looks awkward? I think to go with https://names.sale, but 'www' give me additional 480 monthly searches in Google.

Click to expand...

www.name.sale is far better IMO...

In general established Tld's can get away with it without a problem but new gTld's would be taking a risk, again exceptions can be made through heavy marketing e.g. making the .gTld part of the overall company brand.

The new gTLDs are taking a lot of risks.

e.g. every keyword.ngtld I am registering I am trying to also get keywordngtld.com because I bet a lot of people who type it into a browser will do it that way.

• Using www arguably makes cookie management easier. However, if you have content that needs to be cookie-less, it's generally better to put it on a completely separate domain; doing so provides better security.
• The www subdomain identifies a hostname as serving web content. This can be useful for medium-sized applications that are running several services across different servers, but don't have a dedicated network that can be used to route requests based on protocol/port number.
• Delegated domains can't have root CNAME records, so it's not possible to have a true CNAME record on example.com. CNAMEs are often used for DNS- and IP-based load balancing and failover, not to mention they make managing a large number of domains much easier. However, most modern DNS service providers support pseudo-CNAME identity records. You might have to look beyond the flimsy service offered by your hosting provider or domain registrar for that feature, though. Cloudflare is a popular option that offers some fancy DNS services for free. Hurricane Electric is another reputable provider, but I don't recall if they offer pseudo-CNAMEs.
• "www" is a mouthful--it actually has more syllables than "world wide web". I've been tempted to say "tri-dub", but people would look at me funny.
• Omitting www is more common on modern sites that target younger audiences, as many of the technologies that make doing so realistic weren't around 10 years ago. Tech-related websites seem to be particularly fond of this practice. www has been coming back into style with the recent focus on security/privacy and the advent of Content Security Policy, though.
• It's harder to enforce an HSTS policy for an entire domain and all it's subdomains when using www. On NamePros, we actually have your browser make a background request to a mostly-blank non-www URL each time you visit a page, just to make sure our HSTS policy gets applied properly. HSTS lets us tell your browser that we only allow SSL/TLS requests, and it should refuse to make insecure connections no matter the circumstances. If you're using Chrome, your browser actually comes hardcoded with HSTS enforced for namepros.com. We'll be in other browsers soon, if we're not already already there. Configuring this properly was a challenge because we use www.
• www makes for longer but more obvious URLs.

Opinions:

• I would never put www on a business card without https://. Either naked domain or full URL. It looks old and technically inaccurate/ambiguous--not very programmer-ish. For a new gTLD, I might prefix it with "Website:" if omitting the scheme.
• Any website that doesn't enforce TLS (HTTPS) site-wide clearly isn't making my security/privacy a priority, because it's one of the easiest steps they can take to protect my information. They'll get fake information from me on a good day and a lost customer on any other. Even worse, if they redirect HTTPS to HTTP, then I'm going to know their one-man IT team is a quack.

Paul Buonopane said:

• Using www arguably makes cookie management easier. However, if you have content that needs to be cookie-less, it's generally better to put it on a completely separate domain; doing so provides better security.
• The www subdomain identifies a hostname as serving web content. This can be useful for medium-sized applications that are running several services across different servers, but don't have a dedicated network that can be used to route requests based on protocol/port number.
• Delegated domains can't have root CNAME records, so it's not possible to have a true CNAME record on example.com. CNAMEs are often used for DNS- and IP-based load balancing and failover, not to mention they make managing a large number of domains much easier. However, most modern DNS service providers support pseudo-CNAME identity records. You might have to look beyond the flimsy service offered by your hosting provider or domain registrar for that feature, though. Cloudflare is a popular option that offers some fancy DNS services for free. Hurricane Electric is another reputable provider, but I don't recall if they offer pseudo-CNAMEs.
• "www" is a mouthful--it actually has more syllables than "world wide web". I've been tempted to say "tri-dub", but people would look at me funny.
• Omitting www is more common on modern sites that target younger audiences, as many of the technologies that make doing so realistic weren't around 10 years ago. Tech-related websites seem to be particularly fond of this practice. www has been coming back into style with the recent focus on security/privacy and the advent of Content Security Policy, though.
• It's harder to enforce an HSTS policy for an entire domain and all it's subdomains when using www. On NamePros, we actually have your browser make a background request to a mostly-blank non-www URL each time you visit a page, just to make sure our HSTS policy gets applied properly. HSTS lets us tell your browser that we only allow SSL/TLS requests, and it should refuse to make insecure connections no matter the circumstances. If you're using Chrome, your browser actually comes hardcoded with HSTS enforced for namepros.com. We'll be in other browsers soon, if we're not already already there. Configuring this properly was a challenge because we use www.
• www makes for longer but more obvious URLs.

Opinions:

• I would never put www on a business card without https://. Either naked domain or full URL. It looks old and technically inaccurate/ambiguous--not very programmer-ish. For a new gTLD, I might prefix it with "Website:" if omitting the scheme.
• Any website that doesn't enforce TLS (HTTPS) site-wide clearly isn't making my security/privacy a priority, because it's one of the easiest steps they can take to protect my information. They'll get fake information from me on a good day and a lost customer on any other. Even worse, if they redirect HTTPS to HTTP, then I'm going to know their one-man IT team is a quack.

Click to expand...

Wow, Paul, thank you very much for providing this information. It has been extremely helpful.

Best Regards,
RU

I use content security policy without the www.
I don't use CNAMEs, I just don't like them. Rationale? Probably not, I just don't like them.

I use DNSSEC for anything important, PITA because my registrar - Namecheap - you have to e-mail support to get the DS entered in the TLD zone. I'm curious how load balancing via CNAME would work with DNSSEC because I was under the impression the RFC indicated only one CNAME per owner so multiple CNAME for load balance like some do is an RFC breaking hack, and thus might cause DNSSEC issues. But I might be wrong.

I do often use sub-domains, just sub-domains that have meta-data meaning beyond "www"

But the point about visual balance is a good one, I'll have to look at that.

Paul Buonopane said:

• Using www arguably makes cookie management easier. However, if you have content that needs to be cookie-less, it's generally better to put it on a completely separate domain; doing so provides better security.
• The www subdomain identifies a hostname as serving web content. This can be useful for medium-sized applications that are running several services across different servers, but don't have a dedicated network that can be used to route requests based on protocol/port number.
• Delegated domains can't have root CNAME records, so it's not possible to have a true CNAME record on example.com. CNAMEs are often used for DNS- and IP-based load balancing and failover, not to mention they make managing a large number of domains much easier. However, most modern DNS service providers support pseudo-CNAME identity records. You might have to look beyond the flimsy service offered by your hosting provider or domain registrar for that feature, though. Cloudflare is a popular option that offers some fancy DNS services for free. Hurricane Electric is another reputable provider, but I don't recall if they offer pseudo-CNAMEs.
• "www" is a mouthful--it actually has more syllables than "world wide web". I've been tempted to say "tri-dub", but people would look at me funny.
• Omitting www is more common on modern sites that target younger audiences, as many of the technologies that make doing so realistic weren't around 10 years ago. Tech-related websites seem to be particularly fond of this practice. www has been coming back into style with the recent focus on security/privacy and the advent of Content Security Policy, though.
• It's harder to enforce an HSTS policy for an entire domain and all it's subdomains when using www. On NamePros, we actually have your browser make a background request to a mostly-blank non-www URL each time you visit a page, just to make sure our HSTS policy gets applied properly. HSTS lets us tell your browser that we only allow SSL/TLS requests, and it should refuse to make insecure connections no matter the circumstances. If you're using Chrome, your browser actually comes hardcoded with HSTS enforced for namepros.com. We'll be in other browsers soon, if we're not already already there. Configuring this properly was a challenge because we use www.
• www makes for longer but more obvious URLs.

Opinions:

• I would never put www on a business card without https://. Either naked domain or full URL. It looks old and technically inaccurate/ambiguous--not very programmer-ish. For a new gTLD, I might prefix it with "Website:" if omitting the scheme.
• Any website that doesn't enforce TLS (HTTPS) site-wide clearly isn't making my security/privacy a priority, because it's one of the easiest steps they can take to protect my information. They'll get fake information from me on a good day and a lost customer on any other. Even worse, if they redirect HTTPS to HTTP, then I'm going to know their one-man IT team is a quack.

Click to expand...

Wow, mostly way over my head but I took something really important away from this...I need to read more

You can set your server to show www. or omit it in your site address.
Also the browser may still cause issues until all browsers have been readied for the new extensions.

startup.club use 'www' in their ad campaign