You should know WWW vs non-WWW web address and which is best for SEO in wordpress. In the world of digital space, you can see both kind of site URL, though , there exists a little difference when it comes to search engine optimisation. As usual, www is normally added before domain as prefix and in that case it looks better than naked domain that does not include www before it. Both version of URLs of websites are valid but most of the websites have added to its URLs. Even Google too has added www to its web address.
I have to illustrate www vs non-www URLs so that you can understand it and take proper decision as to which one to be given priority while you are going to make a wordpress site. Because if you use both kind of URLs for your site or suddenly redirect non-www version of URLs to www ones, without taking adequate precaution, it may affect your site.
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Why WWW Matters?
When you launch a website, you need two things—-(1) The server and (2) the domain name or simply the domain. You can purchase a web hosting service to store your important files, folders and contents in the web server. On the other hand, you need to register a domain from a domain registrar. The hosting server provides your site IP Addresses to which your domain is mapped. When visitors visit your site, they don’t type IP addresses directly, rather they use your website address. A complete website address contains a fully qualified URL that contains the protocol http or https, colon(:), double slush(//), www and domain.
WWW In the Earlier Days of Web Invention
WWW was created as a host name to point to an IP Address. In the earlier days of Internet, there were no hosting providers, there were their own network of servers. Every server performed a certain type of functions. WWW host name was used for those servers which stored files and shared it over networks. When visitors typed a fully qualified domain name, they could access the server within a particular network provided by a network provider.
This traditional way has now changed with the invention of advanced network and Internet. Nowadays, a single server with one IP address can work both as a web server and a mail server. Now, it is possible to point both the root domain( domain without www) and the host name, namely, www to the same IP address. So, in technical terms, it does not matter as to whether you add www prefix to your domain name or not, and regardless of it visitors can access your website.
WWW vs Non-WWW and SEO Impacts
To understand properly the www vs non-www version of URLs, we need to clarify it a little bit. As far as SEO is concerned, we can say that www has no direct or indirect advantage over non-www URLs. Whether you add www prefix before domain name or not is a fact that matters to you. Google’s John Mueller too exposed his views in the same tone.
However, you cannot use both the www and non-www version of your website simultaneously without using 301 Redirect. Using both the version of a site at the same time may affect your site. Besides, Google treats the www and non-www versions as two separate site. If both the versions of the site are indexed, you will have to face Google penalty on account of duplicate contents.
If you launch a website without www prefix, it is good if it is small, gets low traffic and does not have any sub-domain. In such kind of site, you need to map both your root domain and hostname to the same IP address provided from your web hosting provider. And, this is done using A-type record.The website that contains only root domain aka naked domain( the domain without www) may grow big day by day. Even when it gets thousands or millions of traffic per day, a single server which hosts your site cannot manage overloads and may lose organic traffic. Under such a circumstances, your hosting server becomes weak and to get the expected traffic, you need to redirect your traffic from the current weak server to a stronger one. That’s why some big websites like Amazon and Facebook have not mapped their domain to a single IP address. To handle the increased traffic they use Content Delivery Network(CDN).
You too need to use CDN to deliver your contents to millions of traffic securely and quickly. But the matter of fact is that, as your website has not added www prefix to its domain URL, you cannot point your non-www host name to a CDN domain. But to use CDN, you ought to point your website to a CDN domain, not to an IP address. You can theoretically map your domain both to an IP address using an A- record and to a CDN domain using a DNS CNAME record, but at the same type CNAME record does not work with other records.
In other words, the naked domain cannot have a DNS CNAME record to point traffic from a failing server to a CDN. So, to create a DNS CNAME record, your site must have ‘www’ as host name so that you can map it to a CDN of your choice. Also, you can create and add an A record to point your root domain to your website’ IP address.
WWW vs Non-WWW and Website Cookies
Websites without www let browsers store cookies for each sub-domain including the root domain. Without www cookie is placed on the visitor’s device. Suppose your root domain is yoursite.com and the subdomains are:
- blog.yoursite.com
- service.yoursite.com
- product.yoursite.com
- contact.yoursite.com
Now, when a visitor visits your site aka yoursite.com and sets cookies for it, cookies are automatically passed down to the subdomains as per cookie rule set forth by RFC6265. Because naked domain cannot store cookies alone and sends it to other subdomains. On account of storing cookies by each subdomain, you cannot track which contents visitors are interacting with within your site. It negatively impacts your site and increases load time. That’s why big sites use a subdomain to store and deliver the static contents (like css files, images, JavaScripts, video) to increase the performance of the main server.
On the other hand, using www allows a subdomain to store unique cookies that helps a web master to track which page or post has a visitor interacted with. So, we can conclude that there are differences between www vs non-www versions of sites. Using www gives you more advantages to manage cookies, CDN and sharing data from one server to another one.
So, ultimately, www is more SEO-Friendly than non-www version of URLs.
