In the early days of the web, every site’s domain name was prepended with “www”. It’s nowhere near as common today — many sites choose to simply use the naked domain, but I’m often asked whether there is any particular reason to choose one option over the other. Is there any advantage to having “www” in your site’s domain?
The most common reason to discard “www” is for branding. The naked domain is snappy, looks better on promotional material, and most brands don’t want something as important as their domain name cluttered with unnecessary and unrelated letters.
What exactly is the “www”? Technically, it’s a subdomain traditionally used to indicate that a site is part of the web, as opposed to some other part of the Internet like Gopher or FTP. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it is traditional to include an indication of the services offered by a server in the domain, and Tim Berners-Lee used “www” for the first web pages at CERN.
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