Andrew Fraser DBA

No www for WordPress

For Apache webservers displaying normal html, adding these lines to file “.htaccess” is a good idea:

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

Because it will strip out the “www.” from URLs. As recommended at http://no-www.org/

But if your website runs WordPress, a different (and simpler) method is required:

In the WordPress Site Admin screen, choose

• “Settings”, then
• “General”, and then
• edit the “WordPress Address” URL to remove the “www.” part.

You can do both changes – .htaccess and WordPress – if you want. That would be worthwhile if your site had a mix of wordpress and standard html pages. But make sure to do it in the order of (1) WordPress change first, then (2) .htaccess change afterwards. Otherwise the two changes will conflict and the WordPress pages will not be displayed at all.