Question

What I’m trying to do is to redirect my website visitors who enter example.com to http://www.example.com.

I would do this with a standard redirect, but I don’t know how to make a site specific to WWW or non-WWW addresses.

I see that Firefox thinks my site is clearly different at the WWW version, because it reloads it without using the cache. How can I make a non-WWW specific index.html page to redirect them to http://www.example.com?

Answer 1

Try this mod_rewrite example:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteCond %{HTTPS}s ^on(s)|
RewriteRule ^ http%1://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

This will append www. to every request that’s host does not start with www. and redirect to it with a permanent redirect. The URI protocol is also preserved but you might want to add a condition to only redirect specific request methods (like GET and HEAD).