I have finally removed the www from hiltmon.com. The 1990’s have passed and www no longer makes sense in URL’s. Maybe it’s time you did the same to your site too.

What triggered this change was that, as of 14 October 2014, Google Analytics started throwing an error if you had links to www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com. This is because it treated links with www and without as different.

Removing the www was easy. I used Global Search and Replace (⇧⌘F in TextMate 2) to find //www.hiltmon and replace it with //hiltmon. Then regenerated the site.

But we are still faced with the problem that remote links to the site may still include the www in their URL’s. The solution is a 301 redirect. Setting that up depends on your hosting provider. For Dreamhost¹, it required clicking one radio button:

Welcome to hiltmon.com.

Follow the author as @hiltmon on Twitter.