How to redirect www to non www

We have been asked by users many times how to redirect their website from www to non www. In order to redirect all of the requests for www.example.com to example.com you should set the appropriate rewrite rule.

Should I use WWW. in my site?

Short answer: There’s no need.

Since the beginning of the Internet we were used to have websites with the famous WWW. in front of all the domain names.

Ex: www.yclas.com

That’s something some companies still use, but almost all of the new websites are not using the WWW.

What should I do? Redirect all the request from www.yclas.com to yclas.com, that’s easy ;). You can do this from almost all the hosting panels I have checked in a simple and timely manner.

Why not the WWW? The WWW. is actually another subdomain in your server and your clients need to type the WWW to enter your site. So always have a redirect, just in case, they don’t type it.

What happens if I am using the WWW? Really it doesn’t matter what you do, just stick to the domain you choose to avoid future problems and remember to have the correct redirects.

A bit of more info about WWW.

World Wide Web:
n. Abbr. WWW

1) The complete set of documents residing on all Internet servers that use the HTTP protocol, accessible to users via a simple point-and-click system.

2) n : a collection of internet sites that offer text and graphics and sound and animation resources through the hypertext transfer protocol.

How to do it

You can do this by adding the following lines on the top of your .htaccesss file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Save your changes and check your site. Try different www and non-www combinations of your domain to see if the redirect is working as expected.