Drop WWW

June 26, 2015 — by Per Christensson

For decades, most website URLs have started with "www." Why? There is actually no good reason.

Even Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with creating the web, said that the widespread use of "www" was unintended. It was initially used to differentiate between websites and FTP locations, but even that wasn't necessary, since you can easily distinguish the two by looking for "http://" or "ftp://" at the beginning of the URL.

Early webmasters jumped on the "www" bandwagon and it soon became the default prefix for websites published on Apache servers. Before long, nearly all websites included "www" in their web addresses, which is why most URLs start with "www." today.

But that's changing. Many popular websites, such as Twitter, Mashable, and Instagram don't include "www" in their URLs. Neither does PC.net. Dropping www is becoming increasingly popular – especially for new websites. More and more existing websites are dropping www as well. That's why I created a website called Drop WWW.

Drop WWW is a resource that explains why you should drop www from your URL and how to do it. It also includes information about SEO considerations and a list of websites that have dropped www. If you're a webmaster and you are thinking about removing "www" from your URL, visit Drop WWW to learn the basics.