Securing Your Domain: Enforcing WWW Prefix with HTTPS in htaccess

Last Updated: February 3, 2024

Enforcing WWW Prefix with htaccess

Ensuring your website is accessible with a "www" prefix can be crucial for maintaining consistent domain representation across the web. It can also help with search engine optimization (SEO) by preventing the split of page rankings between different versions of your domain. Here's how you can enforce a "www" prefix for any domain accessed, using Apache's htaccess file.

Step-by-Step Guide

  1. Open or create a dot htaccess file in the root directory of your website.
  2. Paste the following configuration into your htaccess file:
    3. RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
  3. Replace http with https in the RewriteRule if your site is served over HTTPS.
  4. Save the changes to your htaccess file.

This configuration checks if the requested domain does not start with "www." and redirects it to its "www" version, ensuring all visitors access your site through a uniform URL format.

Why Use WWW?

Using "www" has both historical and practical reasons. Technically, it can help with DNS flexibility and cookie management for large websites. However, whether to use "www" or not is largely a matter of personal or corporate preference today.

Implementing this redirection can help streamline your site's access method and potentially improve your SEO efforts by consolidating your domain's authority into a single, preferred URL format.