www vs no-www duplicate which should I use

[touristips]

site is no-www

I caught this in archives.

Will this by my fix?

Mike Davis Online Marketing Manager at McKesson

• May 22, 2013

Easy fix:

in your .htaccess file, use this

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Remember to replace domain.com with your domain name.
Enjoy!

[RobertFisher]

touristips

You can use either without any negative effects whatsoever. The .htaccess above is correct for non www. Also, in GWMT go in and select a preferred domain as a backup. So, since you are using non www, go to GWMT and top right corner you will see the tools wheel. Click it and go to site settings. Then select the non www.

This will insure all is correct.

Best

[Jonathan1979]

I would go for www.  There are some technical reasons why you would want www's.

I don't know the full reason, but the way some hosts configure their caching, and cpanel cloudflare integration you may be forced to use www's if you want to take advantage of that.  Take a popular host like Siteground for instance, if you wanted to use their supercacher and cloudflare you must use www's.

Sorry I cannot provide clear technical reasons, as I don't fully understand it, but I have had to deal with this in the past.  Prior to running into these issues, I used to think it didn't matter and had all my sites with the non-www's.  Its not a problem on the whole, but you should be aware in a very small number of cases it might be (of course you can just avoid any problems by avoiding that particular configuration, it just might be annoying thats all).

[Dan-Lawrence]

doesnt matter which one you go for so long as you stick with it to be consistent

most people these days seem to be going for non www option