Why do urls start with www

Who is this "we"? We do not prepend our URLs with "www". We really don't. We even ask on ServerFault again and again and again how to set things up to omit the "www". If you choose to use a bare domain, example. In this case you would need to secure a second domain for hosting only static content. JdeBP please don't take it personally, when I say WE I mean like when I say "WE drive cars" you may not drive a car, you might ride a bike, and I may not be talking about YOU, but still a lot of people drive cars and a lot of people use www.

Whoever said anything about personal? Did you not get that all of those people coming to ServerFault that I pointed to amongst others are not me? I assert that it isn't even "a lot of people" who do what you describe in the question. Heck, WWW browsers have for a long time had a search path mechanism to try to cope with the many people who leave the "www" off. Show 2 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Mark Mark 2, 12 12 silver badges 15 15 bronze badges. That makes sense, however, if you are using an SSL, won't this break it?

John, depends on your SSL certificate single host header, multiple host header under that domain, or wildcard domain — Brandon. Add a comment. Jakob Borg Jakob Borg 1, 1 1 gold badge 10 10 silver badges 13 13 bronze badges. Mobile Newsletter banner close.

Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Internet Basics. The key point is that semantically one domain name represents one single server.

So, choose one of your domains as your canonical one! There are two techniques below to allow the non-canonical domain to work still. In this case, you need to configure the server receiving the HTTP requests which is most likely the same for www and non-www URLs to respond with an adequate HTTP response to any request to the non-canonical domain.

This will redirect the browser trying to access the non-canonical URLs to their canonical equivalent. The HTML5 boilerplate project has an example on how to configure an Apache server to redirect one domain to the other. This has no impact on the human reader of the page, but tells search engine crawlers where the page actually lives.

This way, search engines don't index the same page several times, potentially leading to it being considered as duplicate content or spam, and even removing or lowering your page from the search engine result pages. When adding such a tag, you serve the same content for both domains, telling search engines which URL is canonical.