Geek & Mild by Sean Sperte

Removing “www” From a Domain

Here’s what I do to remove “www” from my domain. I put this code in my .htaccess file:

1. RewriteEngine On
2. #Handle removal of “www”
3. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.YOURDOMAIN.com(.*)$ [NC]
4. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://YOURDOMAIN.com/$1 [R=301,L]

A couple quick notes about this method if you want to use it as your own:

1. In order to see/edit .htaccess, you may have to show “invisible” files in your FTP application.
2. This only works on servers running Apache.

For more information, and a technical explanation of what each line does, read John Gruber’s post (and subsequent opinion of why one would want to do this) from May 2006.