Force Non-WWW URL in WordPress

Making sure all your guest are coming in through the same url can be important for SEO. Google may see your domain as two sites depending how you use the WWW and non-WWW url. If Google does pickup both your WWW and non-WWW WordPress site, you may get flagged for duplicate content.

To mitigate these problems, it can be useful to force all users through the same url. For example, on this site, going to http://www.dave.kz/* will be 301 redirected to http://dave.kz/*. To force everyone to use the same URL, open up your .htaccess file. It should look something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress

You’ll need to add these two lines. Make sure you put them in the exact same place.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dave.kz
RewriteRule (.*) http://dave.kz/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Make sure you replace the “!^dave.kz” and “http://dave.kz/” with your domain.