It’s Time to Drop the “www”

By Daniel Miessler on July 24th, 2007: Tagged as Culture | Geek | Internet | Protocols | Standards

It’s no longer necessary to use “www” when referring to websites. It’s a waste of storage, a waste of ink, and it takes 2-5 times as long to pronounce as saying the domain by itself. Enter no-www.

no-www No-www is an initiative to make all websites accessible from both the http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/ forms of their names. The reason behind it is to standardize domain names providing web content and to avoid typing unnecessary letters. — Wikipedia

The reason for using the “www” hostname prefix when entering websites is now a matter of history. It’s old. Deprecated. Outdated. Antiquated. Like websites that only work in Internet Explorer, sites that break when you use the domain alone should be firmly encouraged to join the 21st century. It’s wasteful to type, and it’s cumbersome to pronounce. Consider that it takes nine syllables to properly enunciate three characters.

Some argue that there is still a good reason to separate traffic destined to web servers from that destined to the domain itself. I think this is precisely the idea that’s become obsolete. The reason for that differentiation in the past was that the other protocols were as prolific (or even more prolific) than HTTP at the time. HTTP was just one of many options, so it made no sense to give any type of traffic a preference by pointing the root of a given domain to the system that hosted that content.

Things are different now. HTTP is utterly dominant. Sites interacting with the public on any serious scale does so via a web server, so making this the default is a matter of obvious practicality. This doesn’t mean we should abolish the use of hostnames. Hostnames are excellent tools for separating traffic and making meaningful associations with users. The argument here is simply for having the root point to the web content as a matter of convention.

As for people who include it when speaking, there’s no need to be rude when correcting them. Just kindly inform them that it’s faster if they just go to the domain itself, and that the “www” isn’t needed.

For more information, check out the no-www FAQ, and feel free to fly their sitecon seen above.:

[Edited 07.27.07]

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  • http://dmiessler.com Daniel Miessler

    @Bear

    It doesn’t shoot down the idea. As I said in the piece, the concept isn’t to abolish hostnames — only to point the root of the domain to the main web content. And by the way, you can just do the same with your setup as well. Send the external DNS queries to your internal DNS server, and point the root to the IP address of your web content. This isn’t a discussion of eliminating options — just changing default behavior.

    But the purpose is not to say what’s best for everyone, but rather what’s best for the Internet and its users in general.

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  • http://www.neohide.com/ Keith

    I have to agree with this story. It is perhaps time to drop the “www” prefix to domain name, as they simply serves not much of a purpose. I have started trimming off the www on some of my sites, and I find that they work equally well.

    However, it is best to careful when switching from a “www” domain to a non-www domain name, as it may temporarily result in a loss of traffic and page indexing on search engine. It has to be done with extra care. You definitely will not want to result in loss of traffic.

  • http://www.neohide.com Keith

    I have to agree with this story. It is perhaps time to drop the “www” prefix to domain name, as they simply serves not much of a purpose. I have started trimming off the www on some of my sites, and I find that they work equally well.

    However, it is best to careful when switching from a “www” domain to a non-www domain name, as it may temporarily result in a loss of traffic and page indexing on search engine. It has to be done with extra care. You definitely will not want to result in loss of traffic.

  • Chuck

    I recommend using uuuuuu instead of www. The existence of a “w” has peeved me forever. I mean, we don’t have a “double-o” or a “double-e”, right? Just how hard is it to continue to hold the key down, anyway?

  • Chuck

    I recommend using uuuuuu instead of www. The existence of a “w” has peeved me forever. I mean, we don’t have a “double-o” or a “double-e”, right? Just how hard is it to continue to hold the key down, anyway?

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  • Dean

    Just get everyone to stop saying “double-U” three times and make up a new word for it, or we could say “triple-double-u” at only five syllables (Nearly a 50% savings!) or “six-u”; that’s only two syllables (Over 75% OFF!) Seriously, what do we do about those who insist on typing www-dot in front of every address even when you don’t say it?

  • Dean

    Just get everyone to stop saying “double-U” three times and make up a new word for it, or we could say “triple-double-u” at only five syllables (Nearly a 50% savings!) or “six-u”; that’s only two syllables (Over 75% OFF!) Seriously, what do we do about those who insist on typing www-dot in front of every address even when you don’t say it?

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  • http://www.seochester.co.uk/website-design-optimisation.html Website Design Chester

    An interesting topic of discussion here. I agree with “PC Pete” in the fact that using the “www” in print makes it clear that a website is being referenced. The thing that still amazes me is that most people still type a web address into a search bar instead of a the browsers address bar!

  • http://www.seochester.co.uk/website-design-optimisation.html Website Design Chester

    An interesting topic of discussion here. I agree with “PC Pete” in the fact that using the “www” in print makes it clear that a website is being referenced. The thing that still amazes me is that most people still type a web address into a search bar instead of a the browsers address bar!

  • Luke

    Some domains might have multiple websites physically hosted on separate servers. For example:

    http://www.mysite.com
    wiki.mysite.com
    forum.mysite.com

    They all use the same protocol, HTTP, so there would still need to be some other distinction to identify which machine any particular request is actually referring to.

    In this case, I suppose the bare string “mysite.com” could be treated as a synonym for one of the three depending on their relative popularity, and traffic could be rerouted accordingly. But the other two servers would have to retain their individual unique names.

  • Luke

    Some domains might have multiple websites physically hosted on separate servers. For example:

    http://www.mysite.com
    wiki.mysite.com
    forum.mysite.com

    They all use the same protocol, HTTP, so there would still need to be some other distinction to identify which machine any particular request is actually referring to.

    In this case, I suppose the bare string “mysite.com” could be treated as a synonym for one of the three depending on their relative popularity, and traffic could be rerouted accordingly. But the other two servers would have to retain their individual unique names.

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