Best Wordpress Plugins: Enforce www. Preference

It it always a good idea to decide if you want to make your website accessible through http://www.domain.com or http://domain.com, and stick with it. Having both of those versions working might split your backlink count and cause problems with search engine indexation (you can read more about it on the article WWW or no-WWW?).

The best way to solve this problem is to set a 301 redirect. Sometimes, however, you might find it difficult to get the PHP code working or your server might not support the .htaccess redirect. In that case you can turn to a Wordpress plugin called “Enforce www. Preference”.

Once you upload and activate the plugin it will enforce the address that you have on the Wordpress control panel (under the General tab on Options). If on the control panel you have http://www.domain.com, for instance, the plugin will add a www. every time a visitor tries to access the site through http://domain.com. Another advantage of this plugin is that it removes the index.php from the end of URIs.

Daniel Scocco on March 30, 2007 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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20 Responses to “Best Wordpress Plugins: Enforce www. Preference”

egon on March 30th, 2007 5:06 pm

that’s just…awesome. How many people are seriously comfortable with going into their .htaccess files and messing around? Not many, that’s how. How many.
Mike Panic on March 30th, 2007 6:13 pm

Painless 5 second install, thanks!
Mikulla on March 30th, 2007 7:47 pm

Wordpress seems pretty cool. I, however, love textpattern. That’s my story and I’m stickin to it.
Daniel on March 31st, 2007 1:52 am

Mikulla, Wordpress is the best platform in my opinion, but that does not mean other platforms do not work. If you are getting what need from yours than stick it with! I mean there are people that love Blogger hehe.
Hans on March 31st, 2007 3:02 am

Thanks for the blogging about it…. I just added it you mine
Alexandre on March 31st, 2007 5:14 pm

I use .htaccess to rip off the http://www.

Just to remember, in Google Webmasters Tools there’s a way to specify what’s the version you prefer to be indexed, with or without http://www.
egon on April 1st, 2007 2:45 am

Yes Alexandre, Google Webmaster tools has that preference if you usw their sitemaps (which you should,) but it still doesn’t apply to other search engines (which still matter, btw.)
Daniel on April 1st, 2007 3:04 am

egon, I am not sure about the sitemap deal, this would be a great discussion :). I used to have it, but then when I did some changes on the blog I decided to remove it, and have been without it for the past 2 months, without bad effects hehe.

I know it helps to get your pages indexed faster, but for some people it also damaged their SERPS. Anyway we discuss it on another post!
Keith on April 4th, 2007 7:11 pm

This is awesome. Especially for the podpress plugin. My player always shows now
Rory on June 23rd, 2007 12:08 pm

I have the plugin, but it doesn’t seem to work. My options page says hamelife.com but even when you type in http://www.hamelife.com it takes you straight to www without the redirect.

I tried changing the htaccess file, but it totally stripped out the CSS from my site, so I’m obviously not doing that right. Any suggestions?
Rory on June 23rd, 2007 12:12 pm

Okay, I’ve just tested the link in my previous comment, and it does redirect to hamelife without the http://www. But tests I’ve run - say, at no-www.org - tell me that my site does not have a redirect. And if I specifically type in http://www.hamelife.com into my address bar, it takes me to http://www.hamelife.com.

I’m confused.
Jermayn Parker on July 18th, 2007 11:42 pm

Thank you so much…
Idaho Design on June 24th, 2008 3:51 am

Ah, the 301 Redirect. Thanks for pointing out the obvious.
Bang Kritikus on January 28th, 2009 8:48 am

I like blogspot than wordpress
3mss on March 4th, 2009 3:42 am

Thanks for the tips in this blog