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Where Did WWW Go?

I installed the Broken Link Checker plug-in today, because I know I broke a lot of links when I moved my Kat Scratch Fever off of ExpressionEngine and onto WordPress, and I wanted to get them all cleaned up.

The first thing I noticed is that wow, I broke more links than I thought. They’ve all been fixed now, rest assured.

The second thing that I noticed is that WWW seems to be disappearing.

I don’t know if it’s just that I’m old skool, and was born into the computer era where URLs were pretty much required to start with “www.” or what, but I always put www before a web address, unless it’s a subdomain. All my domains are formatted so that if you don’t put www before the domain, the server will add it for you. I like the way it looks a ton better.

But as I was sorting through the Redirect tab of my link checker, I found that most of the sites I was linking to are set to remove www from the URL.

So it got me thinking.. why is everybody removing it en mass? Am I missing some vital piece of information? Is it considered redundant now? Is it to conserve print space? Curious minds want to know!

Do you leave the www or do you remove it, and why? I don’t mean when you type it, I mean it on the core level. This can be done as a domain option on some hosts, and in the .htaccess file on others.

9 Comments

  1. Py
    Py Nov 4, 2010

    Mostly mobile browsing – 4 less chars to type. Also the average person doesn’t know that “www.something.com” and “something.com” are 2 completely separate and valid addresses. Most webhosts are now just pointing both addresses to the same place. I notice SSL vendors are also now including both www and non in the same certificate for the same price. Was ridiculous having to buy 2 to cover some typing it and some not.

    • katili
      katili Nov 4, 2010

      I like how easy Dreamhost makes it to redirect to one or the other :)

  2. yoshi
    yoshi Nov 4, 2010

    People are just lazy and don’t wanna type the www. that’s all. :D

    • katili
      katili Nov 4, 2010

      That’s not the part I mean, though. You can force the server to either add or remove the www (or ignore if its there or not) using htaccess and redirect to one or the other. If I type the www a lot of sites are redirecting to remove it. That’s what I’m curious about.

      If you don’t type the www for my sites, the server will add it for you.

      • yoshi
        yoshi Nov 5, 2010

        yeah there’s an easy plugin that matt wrote for wordpress that removes the www. maybe it’s all matt’s fault lol

        • katili
          katili Nov 5, 2010

          I’m going to hold him personally responsible lol! Damn you, Matt!!

  3. Evita
    Evita Nov 5, 2010

    I wouldn’t have ever noticed that.. maybe because I’ve never had my own website? I never type the www but that’s because I’m lazy.

  4. Jules
    Jules Nov 5, 2010

    Aw, I’ll miss www :( I always had it on my domain, too.

    • katili
      katili Nov 5, 2010

      Of course you did, I put it there :P

Comments are closed.