Article Domains & DNS

www or no www: does it still matter?

Neither version is technically better any more; the only real mistake is leaving both live without one properly redirecting to the other.

iFastHosting Support Team Updated 26 August 2026 8 min read Beginner

Both www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com can point at exactly the same website, and for most sites today, deciding between them is a stylistic choice rather than a technical one. The genuine mistake is not which you pick — it is leaving both live as separate, competing versions of your site instead of choosing one and redirecting the other to it properly.

Where www actually came from

In the early web, www was a convention used to identify the specific machine within an organisation's network responsible for serving web pages, distinct from other machines handling mail or other services under the same domain. Splitting them this way made technical sense when a single domain often mapped to several different physical servers doing different jobs. That underlying reason has almost entirely disappeared — modern hosting handles a domain and its web traffic together as a matter of course — but the naming convention stuck around out of habit and familiarity long after the original justification for it went away.

Does either version affect SEO?

Not directly, and not in the way older advice sometimes suggests. Search engines treat www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as two separate addresses that happen to serve identical content, which is exactly the kind of duplication search engines are built to handle — provided you tell them clearly which one is the canonical version. The actual risk is not choosing wrongly between them; it is failing to declare one as canonical at all, which can quietly split ranking signals and backlink credit between two addresses instead of consolidating them onto one.

Does either version affect speed?

Historically, some argued that a bare domain without www could not use cookie-free subdomains for serving static assets, which mattered for page load performance under older web practices. Modern hosting, compression, and content delivery approaches have made this argument obsolete for the overwhelming majority of websites — the difference, if it exists at all today, is not something a typical site would ever notice in practice.

So what should actually decide it?

Reason to prefer www	Reason to prefer no www
Slightly more familiar to some visitors as "how websites look"	Shorter, cleaner in print, on business cards, and spoken aloud
Occasionally required or preferred by certain third-party services or older integrations	Matches how most people now say a domain out loud, dropping the `www` automatically

Neither column is decisive on its own. Pick whichever you personally prefer, or whichever matches how you already refer to the business elsewhere, and move on — this decision genuinely does not warrant much more deliberation than that.

Setting it up correctly once you have decided

Whichever version you choose, the other one still needs to work — visitors will type both regardless of your preference — but it should redirect cleanly to your chosen version rather than serving a separate, duplicate copy of the site.

Set the DNS so both versions resolve
Typically an A record on the bare domain and a CNAME on www pointing back at it, so both reach your hosting. See how to add a CNAME record if this is not already configured.
Choose your canonical version
Decide, deliberately, whether www or the bare domain is the "real" address that everything should point to.
Redirect the other version to it
Set up a permanent redirect from the non-canonical version to the canonical one, so a visitor typing either address always ends up on the same URL in their address bar. See how to redirect one domain to another for the general mechanics, which apply here between the two versions of the same domain as well.
Check your SSL certificate covers both
Whichever certificate secures your site needs to cover both the bare domain and the www version, since visitors and search engines alike will reach both addresses even after the redirect is in place.

Never leave both live as separate, non-redirecting copies

If both versions load identical content without one redirecting to the other, you have effectively published your entire site twice under two different addresses. This splits search visibility between them, confuses which address people share and link to, and is the one genuinely harmful outcome of this whole decision — far more so than which version you originally chose.

Once redirected, check both addresses in a browser to confirm they land on the same final URL, and that the address bar shows your intended canonical version after the redirect completes.

Does the choice ever get made for you?

Occasionally, yes. A minority of third-party services, older integrations, or specific platform requirements still expect one form or the other, and in those cases the practical decision is largely made for you — there is little value fighting a service's own requirement purely for stylistic preference. Outside of those specific cases, though, the decision genuinely is yours to make, and switching later is possible, if mildly disruptive, should you ever change your mind — it simply means swapping which side of the redirect is canonical and updating anywhere you have already promoted or printed the old version.

What to do if you inherit a site with both already live

If you take over an existing site and discover both versions currently serve identical content with no redirect between them, treat fixing that as a priority ahead of almost anything else stylistic on the list. Check your analytics, if you have any history to look at, to see which version has accumulated more traffic and existing backlinks, and make that one canonical rather than picking arbitrarily — redirecting toward whichever version already has more established signal preserves more of what the site has already earned than redirecting the other way and starting that consolidation from scratch.