No www vs www website problems
I have been seeing this quite often lately. Someone will tell me a link (URL) to a website and I’ll type it into Firefox or Safari only to find the website doesn’t load and simply displays a “Server not found” error. Now the problem is, I am typing example.com.au without the www (after all, who has the time for all those w’s, right?) and because the DNS hasn’t been setup properly on the DNS or web server, the website will not load. If I type in www.example.com.au the website loads and the world continues to spin…
To me it seems a no-brainer to have your site show up regardless of whether the www is there or not and it’s really not that hard to do, we actually do it by default for every client we host.
Try visting your website with and without the w’s and see if you can see your website on both, if not, you may be missing out on some traffic.
Now for the fun bit! Whichever one you don’t use (www or no www) you will want a 301 redirect to point from one to the other so search engines don’t try to index the same website twice. This is just a matter of placing some code inside your .htaccess file on the server.
Example:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.networkdynamics.com.au [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://networkdynamics.com.au/$1 [R=301,L]
Feel free to contact us if you find you’re having trouble with your website’s URL.