To handle Canonical URL is it best practice to do a 301 redirect or better to have the same IP Address for both www and non www domain?
For example:
Canonical URL/domain wanted is http://example.com
Domain | A Record ------------------------------------ example.com | 192.0.2.34 www.example.com | 192.0.2.34
I understand people may have a CNAME record for www (alias, given that CNAME is called Canonical Name); unsure if this is best practice compared to using the same IP address.
Or is this better.
Domain | A Record ------------------------------------ example.com | 192.0.2.34 * www.example.com 301 redirect to example.com
The short answer to the www vs non-www question is that there is no big difference, no matter which you use. However, if you deep dive a bit, you will realize that www domains have some slight technical benefits that improve a website's performance.
Click on the Redirects icon under the Domains area of your cPanel home page. Select your domain name from the drop down menu on the next line. In the redirects to text box, type in the full URL of your domain, without the www (e.g. http://yourdomain.com). Select the radio button next to Only redirect with www.
A domain without the "www" is called a "naked domain."
For example, if you've chosen to use non-www URLs as the canonical type, you should redirect all www URLs to their equivalent URL without the www. Example: A server receives a request for http://www.example.org/whaddup (when the canonical domain is example.org)
The mechanisms you describe (A
and CNAME
records vs. 301
redirects) are part of two different protocols (DNS and HTTP). A
and CNAME
records have nothing to do with which site your HTTP server serves for different requests.
Let's look at two different DNS configurations:
Host | Type | Data -----------------+-------+------------- example.com | A | 192.0.2.34 www.example.com | CNAME | example.com
nslookup example.com
resolves to 192.0.2.34
nslookup www.example.com
resolves to 192.0.2.34
Host | Type | Data -----------------+-------+------------- example.com | A | 192.0.2.34 www.example.com | A | 192.0.2.34
nslookup example.com
resolves to 192.0.2.34
nslookup www.example.com
resolves to 192.0.2.34
In both cases your canonical domain and your www
subdomain resolve to 192.0.2.34
. However, the only thing your HTTP server will recognize is that it receives requests for both example.com
and www.example.com
on the same IP address. But it doesn't know whether you used A
or CNAME
records for that.
You have to use HTTP 301 redirects to enforce the canonical example.com
in HTTP requests. But that has nothing to do with your DNS configuration.
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