This has been done many times by others, but just a quick tip on how to add or remove www.
from your website’s address. This is helpful for URL canonicalization and user experience consistency. You can also achieve SEO-friendly canonicalization using rel="canonical"
. Oh boy, I’m getting too technical
Here’s the juicy part:
Add the following to the .htaccess
file in your website’s root folder (often named public_html
or www
). If there’s not a file named .htaccess
, you may create it. If you are creating the .htaccess
file, set the permissions to 644
. For security reasons, you don’t want others to be able to write to this file.
Note: These snippets are for http://
only, not secure https://
URLs.
Add www.
Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com/?(.+)?$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.example\.com/$1" [R=301,L]
Remove www.
Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*) [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
This will work with the majority of web hosts in my experience, but not all.
Additional resources
For more .htaccess
information, and great follow-up reading on .htaccess
, check out corz.org’s tutorial and second tutorial on some of the most-used .htaccess
tricks.
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