Duplicate Content: Always Redirect Website to WWW

Anyone who deals with websites should know the problem: search engines do not like duplicate content.

However, most websites can be accessed under both addresses example.com and www.example.com. As a result, any content is held twice - once on example.com/content and another time on www.example.com/content - and already we have double content accessible on the net without maybe having noticed it at all.

Moreover, the assignment and the link structure is ambiguous with this. Some visitors are using your website with www, others without www. Problems may occur, for example, whenever a user logs in without "www" and then changes to the www version by clicking a link and is maybe logged out with this action, because the user is only logged in in one of the versions.

The Solution

The solution for this problem is implemented quickly and easily. Just write the following lines into your htaccess file, replacing example.com with the domain of your website:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [L, R=301]

This is what happens: All requests without www (Rewrite Condition in the second line) will be redirected to the version with wwww (third line). The ^(.*)* and the $1 ensure that whatever was written behind the domain is kept. Simultaneously, a search engine friendly 301 Permanent Redirect is created, so that the search engine knows that the content in question is now available elsewhere and also stays there. Instead of "https" we can of course also write "http" if our website does not have a HTTPS certificate.

If you now enter example.com/content in your browser, the request is automatically redirected to https://www.example.com/content and the URLs are clean.