Does Not Having WWW. Hurt Your SEO?

Updated December 3, 2021

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Easy to Find

Last week we broke down what makes up a URL. This week we’re going to look at if not having www at the beginning of your website address will damage your SEO or not. Some webmasters have decided to drop the www from their websites. But is that a good idea?

Keep It Short

In the old days of the internet, you would always have to type “www.” before the name of any website you wanted to visit. But since most browsers have turned their search bar into an omnibar (meaning it will also act as a window to a search engine as well as an address bar) the need to add the “www.” prefix has been removed. So if you fire up Google Chrome and type www.online-sales-marketing.com or online-sales-marketing.com you’ll get to our website either way.

Drop it Like it’s Hot

Because of this, some webmasters have made the decision to drop the “www.” from their website’s address entirely. Doing this makes the website’s URL shorter, and potentially, easier to remember (although by this stage if you can’t remember “www.” we’d be surprised). But does it have an SEO implication?

Google Says What?

The short answer is “No. Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that it should have no impact on how Google views your website at all. So, it’s a totally cosmetic choice. The only thing you would need to worry about is if the website was previously “www.”, setting up redirects for all of your pages.

World Wide Web

Will you drop “www.” from your URL? We’d love to hear the reasons why if you do, and if you notice any changes in your site’s SEO performance. One thing that we think could damage your SEO is not having your site set up as HTTPS. If you’re interested in reading more about that, then check out our article on why you need to be HTTPS here.