WWW vs Non-WWW: Which Should You Choose?

www is simply a subdomain, a hostname under your domain, exactly like mail.example.com or shop.example.com. The bare name, example.com, is called the apex, root or naked domain. Early web servers were given the www label by convention, and it stuck.

Because www is just a label, it needs its own DNS record. If you create the apex A record but forget the www record (or the reverse), half your visitors see a “site can't be reached” error. Most browsers now hide www in the address bar, so visitors rarely know which host they opened; servers, crawlers and cookies always do.

A cookie set with Domain=example.com is sent to the apex and to every subdomain; a host-only cookie set on www.example.com stays on www. That rule decides whether login sessions survive a host switch and how far your cookies travel.

A site on the bare domain that sets domain-wide cookies also sends them to mail.example.com, cdn.example.com and any other subdomain, adding bytes to every request and exposing session cookies to whatever runs there. A site on www can keep cookies on the website host only, which is one reason large sites and CDN users prefer www. If you move an existing site from www to the apex, expect every visitor to be logged out once, because the old host-only cookie does not follow them.

Add one permanent 301 redirect from the unused host to the chosen host that keeps the path and query string, and make sure your SSL certificate covers both names. The redirect must be a single hop: https://www.example.com/page should go straight to https://example.com/page, not via http.

On Apache or LiteSpeed, put this at the top of the site's .htaccess file to send www to the bare domain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

To force www instead, swap the condition and target:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

mod_rewrite carries the original query string across automatically. On Nginx, give the unused host its own server block:

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name www.example.com;
    # ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key for www.example.com
    return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}

In WordPress, set both Settings → General URL fields to the chosen host first; if one field says www and the other does not, the server rule causes a redirect loop. Then test with curl -I https://www.example.com/test?x=1, which should return 301 with Location: https://example.com/test?x=1. More patterns are in the .htaccess 301 redirect guide, and the protocol half of the job is in redirecting HTTP to HTTPS.