My website shows its URL with no www.

eg. domain registered is mysite.co.uk. when i type http://www.mysite.co.uk it switches to mysite.co.uk. it works fine but can I get it to show www if i want it to?

I have no idea what background tou are from so sorry if this is trivial.

I’m not specifically a web guy so someone may have a different (correct 😀 ) opinion.

the “www” portion is simply another domain name. Your hypothetical site of “www.mysite.co.uk” is a hostname, but so is “mysite.co.uk” I’d imagine that whatever you/people use for DNS will redirect those who input “www.mysite.co.uk” to “mysite.co.uk” as both of those hostnames will be associated to the same IP.

Sorry if that wasn’t very clear, as I said I’m not specifically web

The answer is yes, you can.

How you go about doing so though will depend on the way your site is configured on the server software (e.g. Apache2 on an xNix system, IIS on a Windows one.) you’re using.

I’m assuming because of the fact that you’ve asked the question that you haven’t configured it directly on either of the aforementioned pieces of software. (Apologies if that’s an incorrect assumption.)

If you’re using a hosting provider, somewhere in the setup process you will have been asked to specify the domain that you wished to establish the site for, in the example above mysite.co.uk. I suspect that if you were to change that to http://www.mysite.co.uk your problem would be resolved.

If you can provide a little more information in respect of who you’re hosting with I may be able to provide specifics for you, or at least pointers to articles which would walk you through it.

Dan.

The W’s are starting to be considered a bit old fashioned now, if it works without them leave it as it is, it’s much simpler.

Remember back in the day when everyone used to read out URL’s including the h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash and have you noticed how nobody bothers anymore (except the odd pensioner), well this is just the next logical step on from that.

Most likely a redirect from the www. domain (fairly common practice these days).

I wouldn’t worry unless it’s causing problems though.

Hosting is provided by Wesh.

And it’s a WordPress site.

All sorted within WordPress settings. Was showing in there without www. Added it and now showing fine. Thanks for help.

it’s more than just the webhosting bit.
also depends on the DNS zones configured on the domain name control panel. often a few (eg www. mail. etc) are predefined when you register the domain, and they point at their hosting. maybe www. and just the plain domain point at the same webhost.

doesn’t really matter if the www’s are there or not, just so long as everything is consistent (DNS, hosting, and whatever you type in to the wordpress or whatever config).

if you set it up as mysite.co.uk and people navigate to http://www.mysite.co.uk, then there can potentially be some cookie issues if it’s not properly redirected, such as needing to login twice.

depending on your server and the type of access you have you need to look at a redirect. For example, i use a linux server and need to edit the .htaccess file as below:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^singletrackworld\.co\.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.singletrackworld\.co\.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.singletrackworld.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.singletrackworld.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This rule means will redirect .co.uk and with or without www. to http://www.website.com

Could be a .htaccess file in the root of your site adding a mod_rewrite rule.

In it there will be something like;

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

Generally it’s okay to remove it but you may need to resave your permalink structure in WordPress to pick it up.

However, I prefer my URLs without. www is outdated and unnecessary.

liamo

That one took me ages to work out some years back.

A visitor has found your site. Why do you care what the address bar says?