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Maintaining Consistent WWW Prefix in Drupal

Drupal/ Technical/ Wordpress/ Website Development

May 17th, 2007

It has been bothering me for months that visitors arriving at my sites without the www (for example, discover-doug.com rather than www.discover-doug.com) end up at two different places (as far as Google is concerned).

Note to WordPress users: this does not seem to work for WordPress. I just tried it with out success. That is why this blog, which runs on WordPress, will not change discover-doug.com/something into www.discover-doug.com/something.

I just stumbled across the solution in the Drupal Issues page which explains how to fix this.

Actually, I was lucky, because Drupal 5.x has a bug in the.htaccess file. There is provision for this - an explanation and some lines to be un-commented, but I had not bothered to read the .htaccess file.

The bug was just fixed, and it showed up on the Drupal Issues page just this evening, and I was, as I say, lucky to see it.

To make this work, first find the following (wrong and misleading) text in the .htaccess file:

# If your site can be accessed both with and without the prefix www. you
# can use one of the following settings to force user to use only one option:
#
# If you want the site to be accessed WITH the www. only, adapt and
# uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule .* http://www.example.com/ [L,R=301]
#
# If you want the site to be accessed only WITHOUT the www. prefix, adapt
# and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule .* http://example.com/ [L,R=301]

Replace it with the following correct text:

# If your site can be accessed both with and without the ‘www.’ prefix, you
# can use one of the following settings to redirect users to your preferred url
# (either with or without the ‘www.’ prefix). Choose ONLY one option:
#
# To redirect users to your site WITH the ‘www.’ prefix,
# (eg. a user visiting http://example.com/… will be redirected
# to http://www.example.com/…)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
#
# To redirect users to your site WITHOUT the ‘www.’ prefix,
# (eg. a user visiting http://www.example.com/… will be redirected
# to http://example.com/…)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Uncomment the two lines that correspond to either always having a www prefix, or never having a www prefix.

I am hoping this will correct the statistics I see in Google Analytics showing a significant number of referrals from allergy-details.com to www.allergy-details.com!


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