non-www or www for brand new site?

[Darth]

I usually go for www and redirect non-www to www, but the devs for my latest project have inadvertently setup on non-www only. That itself is easily fixed, but it caused me to question my former habit.

Now I am thinking www is maybe just unnecessary.

Do you have a preference for when you setup sites and why? I used to choose www just because I thought maybe it looked better/more legitimate. But as I said now not so sure.

 

[coredev]

I use www but who cares but me. Why are you questioning yourself over such trivial things?

Should be helping your developers to find bugs, put more time into your marketing plan, promotion, etc.

 

[Darth]

I use www but who cares but me. Why are you questioning yourself over such trivial things?

Should be helping your developers to find bugs, put more time into your marketing plan, promotion, etc.

I put the same amount of time into it as you did your reply. I should ask you the same question. In fact, why are any of us here at all?

 

[infotech]

I had my sites domain setup at root when I was using wordpress & shared hosting.
Sometime ago I migrated to static site generators & for hosting I trying on lots of different hosts. Many of them did not allow setting up site on a root domain.
I ended up with netlify which also recommends setting up on a subdomain.
Read this for more info: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/02/28/to-www-or-not-www/

 

[Ryuzaki]

It depends on the domain and how I'm setting up the folder hierarchy. If I'm going to do a flat-file structure where every post is like: .com/title-of-post then I'd might use www. If I'm going to do long URL's with sub-folders, I shorten it a bit by not using www.

At the end of the day, as long as they redirect to the other, like non-www goes to www, then I don't really care. I don't think it has any real impact on the user or SEO or anything else, if you set it up right on the backend.

 

[turbin3]

In my experience, it doesn't make a big difference either way, at least in most cases. More recently, I've taken to going non-www, particularly for new projects. My reasoning for that has simply been effort in going minimalist in everything.

I'm not saying that's a necessity. Lately, I've just liked taking extra care to throw as little at the user as possible, while still meeting minimum viable needs. Stuff like:

//example.com/blue-widget-guide/
or
//example.com/blue-widgets/user-guide/

Know what I mean? It can make for a really clean appearance for users, keeps URL lengths down, etc. By no means do I consider that something that's going to drive ROI on most sites. I'm sure it will on some, where every fraction of a percent improvement is amplified in revenue (e.g. E-commerce). On most though, probably not.

I just generally look at it as a better experience when we're able to cut out meaningless text or other items from the screen, and give users only what they need. That's purely my opinion though, and not one I'm basing on statistical fact.