www and non-www versions
Your website is reachable both with and without the www prefix. Set a default version or add a redirect in the .htaccess file, so search engines don’t index two websites with the same content. In the .htaccess file, you can set the primary version of your website, with or without www. We also recommend setting the primary version of the domain in “Google Search Console“.
How a domain with or without www affects SEO
Websites are usually available both with and without “www” in the domain name. This is quite a common mistake, as people link to the website using both the www and non-www versions. Choosing a primary version stops search engines and people from storing two different addresses for the same website. Although search engines supposedly don’t “penalise” this kind of indexing, it’s still best practice to set up these redirects – not least because it saves you time in visitor analytics, as visits to a page are counted together rather than split across two versions of the page (with and without “www”).