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This reasoning is all based on valid, but technical issues for the hosting side. A general rule for any customer-facing business is to put the customer first. I
by feelix 11y ago
This reasoning is all based on valid, but technical issues for the hosting side.
A general rule for any customer-facing business is to put the customer first. I could list 200 different reasons why you should make the customer register an account with their email address before they can purchase something for you. However, if you put the customer first, in many cases it is easier for them if they don't have to do that. Having the www before the domain name adds unnecessary visual clutter and from the customers point of view, an unnecessary redirect before they can get to your site. A lot of sites use minimalist style everywhere, and it's great. Having the www there for technical reasons is putting the user second in those cases.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jlg23 11y ago> This reasoning is all based on valid, but technical issues for the hosting side. A general rule for any customer-facing business is to put the customer first. The article says: "Should I redirect no-www to www? Yes. Redirection ensures that visitors who type in your URL reach you regardless of which form they use, and also ensures that search engines index your canonical URLs properly."
- id 11y agoWhat is your point? I mean, everything the parent wrote still applies.
- Klinky 11y agoFor very little effort you can simply redirect your main domain, and gain the technical benefits/simplicity of having a www subdomain, all while not inconveniencing your users. This pretty much makes the parent's point of hosting actual content on the main domain for customer convenience moot.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- geomark 11y agoWhere is the best place to do that? A redirect at the domain registrar, in my webserver (e.g. Apache), or in my app?
- crikli 11y agoThere's a slight advantage to doing it at the registrar because it keeps the hit off your servers. This is assuming of course that http://foo.com/bar http://foo.com/bar will get redirected to http://www.foo.com/bar http://www.foo.com/bar rather than just having everything redirected to the http://www.foo.com http://www.foo.com. Edit: I'm wrong. See tadfisher's comment below.
- tadfisher 11y agoNote that the usual method for doing so (a CNAME on the bare domain) prevents you from adding other resource records (such as MX) on the domain. 1. http://joshstrange.com/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-put-a-cname-record-on-your-root-domain/ http://joshstrange.com/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-put-a-cname-rec...
- crikli 11y agoGreat point. And candidly I never actually do this myself (CNAME on the bare domain), I just point it at the server and let apache/nginx handle the redirect.
- jrapdx3 11y agoThat's interesting. Currently I have 2 different domains at 2 different registrars. In each case I have the bare name, www and other subdomains as "A" records, not CNAME. So it doesn't matter if people use the www prefix or not, since both point to the same IP. And with this configuration I've had no trouble with MX records. If the goal is www/no-www transparency, there are other ways to do it, but using a simple DNS setup seems like the least hassle.
- tadfisher 11y ago
- lotyrin 11y agoFind me this customer cohort that gives even a moment's hesitation about whether they're at a naked domain or not.
- id 11y agoIt could add to the overall experience, just like tiny details in a logo or a well-considered font choice could.
- stock_toaster 11y agoFurther, most lay users are familiar with large web properties (amazon, google, apple), and most of those large properties redirect to www (due to aforementioned technical reasons). So if such a user even happens to notice, if anything, they may find it odd to not see a www prefix.
- jsight 11y agoI think that this is exactly right. I have personally observed users become confused over a URL not starting with www. Occasionally I have even seen them add it, just because it was assumed that all addresses should have it at the beginning. This might change eventually, but it will change slowly if so.
- dlubarov 11y agoAesthetics aside, one benefit of naked domains is that shorter URLs are better for sharing in chat programs. 'www.' takes up a nontrivial amount of space in certain environments (e.g., a gchat window within gmail).
- michaelmior 11y agoI'm not sure I understand why this creates any real issues.
- 0xCMP 11y agoI personally dislike it. It's annoying. Links can be long as it already.
- ma2rten 11y agoI think most people are used to having www. in front of a url. If they even notice it, I think it will confuse them not having that.
- holyjaw 11y agoYou're describing a world where everybody expected a website to end in .com, and if not that, then maybe a handful of others. That world is changing; what will people's expectations be in the future?
- spc476 11y agoMy blog has the URL http://boston.conman.org/ http://boston.conman.org/ (leaving http://www.conman.org/ http://www.conman.org/ for other stuff on my website). I had to add a redirect for http://www.boston.conman.org/ http://www.boston.conman.org/ because I had a non-zero number of requests.
- tempestn 11y agoThis is a good point. Any subdomain that you host web pages on should itself have a www sub that redirects, for this reason.
- mark-r 11y agoI've seen some sites that redirect to m.example.com if you're accessing them from a phone. Do you think people are getting confused by that?
- obelisk_ 11y agoThe www serves as a clue that it's a URL. Most people would recognize example.com as a domain even if given no other context. Contrast that with example.design. I think to most, www.example.design would be more recognizable.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 11y agoI think few people look at URLs. They click on whatever is underlined or looks like a button.
- bobfunk 11y agoUptime and performance is typically some of the most important things for customers. Definitively way more important in general than whether there's a www prefix or not...
- glenngillen 11y agoIt sucks that this is the state of things, because of the technical infrastructure that's supporting these systems. But it's absolutely not being advocated because it's technically more efficient, because it's cute for branding, because it helps the marketing team collect customer data. It's entirely based on being able to provide the highest level of consistent service to a customer. Doing it any other way is prioritizing brand over customer.
- jack9 11y agoIt doesn't just suck, it's bad for almost everyone. > Should I redirect no-www to www? My guy reaction is still no, fix the technology that was never designed for this mass consumer use. DNS could support cnames for naked domains, but the standard groups only care about backward compatibility and 0-risk, while consumers still don't understand how DNS works at all, and now we have developers who apparently need articles spoon feeding them why it's bad one way and not another.
- WhoBeI 11y agoWhat!? You saying we can't make absolute rules? We have to consider the context? Horrible person! On that note.. those minimalist designs are quite hard for older or less tech savvy to understand at times. Not the www part of course but the designs in general. Something to consider when putting the customer first maybe..
- forgotpasswd3x 11y agoI think that www vs. no-www, as a matter of "putting the customer first" is so INCREDIBLY insignificant, compared to the thousands of other decisions that go into a product, that it's ridiculous we're even having this conversation. This is looking for optimization in the wrong places at its finest.
- x5n1 11y agoA redirect is also completely invisible to the user, and should only add a few microseconds to the page load. But you should always redirect www. if you are not using www. Many people instinctively type that into the address bar when you tell them a domain name.
- jjoonathan 11y agoA few microseconds, huh? I decided to do some experiments. Here's how long some 301s on common sites took: google.com: 529ms apple.com: 261ms microsoft.com: 142ms reddit.com: 61ms Which is not only 100,000 times longer than a few microseconds but more importantly well above the perception threshold.
- x5n1 11y agotouche.
- buzzdenver 11y agoWhere in the world are you that google.com's 301 takes over half a second ? It's under 100ms for me.
- jrockway 11y agoI don't get the parent's numbers either. I did: $ time (curl -L www.reddit.com > /dev/null 2>&1) real 0m0.410s user 0m0.040s sys 0m0.008s $ time (curl -L reddit.com > /dev/null 2>&1) real 0m0.389s user 0m0.036s sys 0m0.012s So for Reddit, I'm going to make the cost of the redirect 21 milliseconds.
- geofft 11y agoUsing www puts the customer first. Being able to serve your website from a CDN helps the customer: it means the website is up when they want to visit it, and it usually means it's faster for them. Having static content not get cookies helps the customer: it keeps HTTP traffic down, which means that pages load faster. Separating cookies between different websites helps the customer: it means that when, inevitably, blog.example.com gets broken into, the customer's account info at www.example.com is not compromised. (Of course, this assumes that you're doing least-privilege between your various websites, but you're already doing that because you care about your customer and don't want to send them a letter about how you lost their personal information.) Not using a separate top-level domain for static content helps the customer: they know that www.example.com and static.example.com are from the same company they trust, Example Industries, Inc. If you caused their browser to show that it's loading files from "static.excdn.com" or something, they might worry. The customer isn't personally following the redirect; their browser does, so I'm not sure I understand how the redirect deprioritizes the user. As far as visual clutter goes, get an EV cert, which either supplants or replaces the address bar with something much more useful than a URL: https://www.expeditedssl.com/assets/browser-ssl/extended-validation-mobile-safari-ssl-20661a5fae2dfff775c45676c41e75d1.png https://www.expeditedssl.com/assets/browser-ssl/extended-val...
- xpda 11y agoI agree. Microsoft, Apple, and Google have the ability to modify user behavior without much downside. The rest of us are better off making the user experience as fast, efficient, and simple as possible. By coincidence, I just put a 301 redirect on my personal site to go from www.xpda.com to xpda.com two days ago. If I could only get ctrl-enter to submit https://domain.com https://domain.com instead of http://www.domain.com http://www.domain.com in Firefox, I'd be happy. (There was a bug that prevented this last time I checked.)