: Is it essential to type "WWW" when our design contains URL, or is it a matter of taste by now? I love the appearance of traditional url's, because the www in front of them eases and speeds

@Samaraweera207

Coming from a solutions architect perspective, I have never seen a guideline. But there is a good technical reason for making your site at runtime use "www.", and it's all about DNS (avoiding collision with SOA and NS records). So while you might want to share content that says "go to mysite.us the actual hosting should be on "www.mysite.us".

Depending on where/how the site is deployed you can get into situations where users cannot reach the site if it is on "http://mysite.us". The DNS spec has records for different types of servers (MX for mail, etc) but it does not have one for HTTP servers so we are stuck with using an actual subdomain to tell the world "this is for a website". Several hosting providers offer "DNS forwarding" which will let you declare "anyone that connects to mysite.us will be directed to www.mysite.us but what they are actually doing is setting up a minified web server that issues a 301/302/307 to get the user where they want to be.

Most people don't look in the address bar anyway in my experience, and leaving off "www" in conversation and marketing materials is shorter, but in the end users should land on "www.something.something", as "www" should be an actual server.

Type in your address bar "apple.com" or "microsoft.com" or "ibm.com" and notice how you are redirected to a "www" host.

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@Jessie844

To add more technical background to the existing answers: Why would there be differences in DNS between example.com and example.comin the first place? There are many cases when one does not enter an A (or AAAA) record, but instead a CNAME record pointing to something like www42.provider.example.net. This way, a migration of www42.provider.example.net to another IP address can be handled purely within the example.net zone. (With Arecords everywhere, all sites hosted on that one server would have to be adjusted!)

However, with example.com there are certainly already many other DNS records associated (SOA, NS, MX, possibly also TXTfor SPF), and the DNS specification does not allow CNAMEand other record types to be mixed!
Therefore, example.com would require an A (and/or AAAA) record for functionality, thus defying the above-mentioned purpose of central configuration.

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@Angie364

foo.com is not strictly speaking a URL. It's a relative domain name.

It means this: start with your local domains, falling back to the root if you can't find anything there and traverse through com and foo to get to It doesn't say what records to grab from that domain though or what you would do with those records if you did retrieve them.

Most commonly the record of interest is an address record which allows the domain name to be used as a hostname to refer to a machine. There are other kinds of DNS records though.

The www is just the last name in the chain, and it is completely arbitrary. There's a convention of naming the host of the primary Web server for a domain www but that is just a convenience for humans, not something meant to be recognizable to machines. Even then, there are things you can do with machines running webservers other than requesting Web pages from them.

So, not all web servers are named www and just naming one doesn't say what you want to do with it anyway.

That's where URL come in. They tell you how to get to something. They start by telling you how to get it, then where.

How is specified as a "sheme" and for the web, the scheme is either http for regular requests or https for secure requests. Then a separator :// then a hostname telling you where the web server is (maybe a DNS name, maybe something else like an I address or a locally defined name) then a path indicating where the pages is on the web server. (There are a bunch of details I'm skipping over).

It is generally considered good practice to allow www but not encourage it by pointing the address records of both the base domain and that plus www at we servers meant to act as public facing entry points, and then to favour the non www name.

If you want to provide a proper URL that unambiguously shows that you are referring to a website, provide a full URL.
example.ca/ myexample.foo.org/

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@Berryessa866

To explain what the differences are.

example.com is the domain name. www in this case (www.example.com) is the subdomain in the configuration people actually have to direct both www and subdomain-less to the same resources (web files) Also keeping SEO in mind it's important only one of these is leading and the other should direct to the leading one.

That being said, people tend to type in front of everything just because they're used to it, nowadays in commercials and such you see less of the and I suggest you should refrain from using it unless necessary so we can get rid of this in the future.

Of course there might be some sense to adding the www, since it stands for world wide web, but the protocols will do enough, http(s) vs http or others for different applications.

more info and technical reasons: serverfault.com/questions/286132/why-do-we-still-use-www-in-urls
In my opinion you should just refrain from it since it's something redundant and typing less is always better.

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@XinRu324

example.com and example.com are two different addresses.

It is only a common convention for web servers to be configured such that both variants work the same. This convention is not universal, and some web sites will be set up only to respond to one or the other.

You need to confirm with whoever is in charge of the web site, which is acceptable to use. You may also want to see whether the site's listing in Google search shows the "www." or not, as this may indicate the site's preferred address.

If both are acceptable to use, I personally would prefer the variant without the "www." because I find this to be redundant, especially if there is a ".com" at the end which makes it highly recognisable as a web address even without a "www.".

There is no standard that says that one or the other should be used, only conventions and trends. The trends change over time, and I believe it's fair to say there is a gradual trend toward not having the "www." at the start of web addresses.

Here's some light-hearted debate on whether "www." should be used:
no-www.org/ www.yes-www.org/ www.www.extra-www.org/

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@Caterina889

may have valid technical reasons for being used.

When a server is configured it must be set up to use www.example.com and example.com. It is completely possible that example.com loads the site and example.com does not. They are two, different, separate, addresses. This is all controlled by the server. Both addresses may work, or one address may be forwarded to the other. The forwarding could be done from any domain, it just so happens that it's common the address will forward to the non-www address or vice versa. In today's age, most hosting providers configure this and the is not mandatory. They configure the forwarding automatically for their customers. However, you should check your server before removing the from any marketing materials, or even before adding the .
From a design standpoint, it's a matter of preference. If the sites loads with or without the then using it is your choice. As @Dom mentions in his comment above I find the suffix plays a large role. example.com, example.net, example.org are all pretty clear. However, once you enter second or third tier suffixes it can be less clear, especially to audiences that aren't traditionally online audiences (seniors, non-tech organizations, etc). Adding the to more rarely used suffixes is always helpful.

I almost always drop the for first tier domains and almost always include them for second or third tier domains. But that's just my preference.

I'd also point out that phone numbers have changed. I now must dial 10 digits to make a local call, for decades it was only 7 digits, before that it was 5 digits. They may change slowly, but they do change formats :) Of course, thanks to smart phones I now only know my own phone number and can't ever remember anyone else's. :)

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