[Tip] Forcing with or without www. in URL

[Floris]

Think twice before running your site. Do you want to have the www. part included, or not?

Force remove www. from url:

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

Force www. to the url:

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

Add either of the above code to your .htaccess file - inside the xenforo block, just after:

RewriteEngine On

 

[Chimpie]

In your opinion Floris, should we force www or not? And why?

 

[kuyenmotdivad]

I'd use the one without the www as a lot of people dont type in www and it automatically goes to the non www site

 

[Chimpie]

My understanding is that search engines prefer www.

Forcing www. would redirect a url to www.domain.com.

 

[Mikey]

It's really personal preference...

 

[Floris]

It's really personal preference...

Yes, but highly motivated no-www.org

Personally I think it looks cluttered, we type in the browser: xenfans.com
So http and www is obsolete in my book.

I've gone ahead a few years ago by deciding to force remove www. prefix from the domains I run.
And perm 301 redirect all my alias domains to the main domain.
I also decided on force removing the index.php (which xenforo does basically if you use friendly urls)

so

http://www.wetalknation.net/index.php

ends up as

http://wetalknation.net/

 

[Mikey]

Chrome now removes http:// from the visible url anyway, and fades out www. and everything after the tld so that the only thing in the url bar which is 'black' font is the site address itself.

 

[Floris]

Chrome now removes http:// from the visible url anyway, and fades out www. and everything after the tld so that the only thing in the url bar which is 'black' font is the site address itself.

quite annoying when you copy paste sites to friends

 

[kuyenmotdivad]

Found a good article that explains all about www and non-www here : http://tiny.cc/9fkrs

 

[George G Halstead]

I remove the www from the URL, either way, great tip floris. Thanks friend

 

[Blandt]

If you are using subdomains like forum.domain.com, blog.domain.com then use www.domain.com

 

[imported_King Kovifor]

Now... to adapt this to wordpress. haha. I really should take a break from my 24 hour straight working on the site, but I won't.

 

[George G Halstead]

LMAO, king i dunno how you do it. I can go about 8 hours and have on many occasions but WOW to 24 hours.

 

[imported_Brian]

On a side note: If you run a sizable site, remember that cookies served from .domain.com are sent with EVERY SINGLE HTTP REQUEST. If you have a large number of subdomains, you may want to consider redirect all main traffic TO www so that you can serve, say, images, from another subdomain without all the cookie traffic.

 

[Hagai]

Thanks Floris

 

[Cezz]

Hey floris,

Thank you for the tip, I personally use some reversed logic and say

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

This way it will catch all possible differences, be it parked domains' or additional subdomain's etc...

 

[Floris]

Great tip cezz

 

[merk51]

I'm with those who prefer it without www - thanks for these re-writes Floris Anyway (unless I have overlooked it) to get the index.php taken out of it as well?

 

[Floris]

Turn on friendly urls in xenforo, and it will rewrite it already.