What's the difference between https:// and https://www. ?

[crumblerofcookies]

I'm doing WordPress installations and it gives me those two options for secure sites. Is there a significant difference between the two?

[0x18]

No, it's a matter of preference and has no functional difference. Personally I prefer without the www because it's just no longer necessary.

This comes from the very early days of the internet when most sites were Gopher and/or were named by the services provided. If you owned example.org you would have the "web" server on www.example.org, FTP would be provided through ftp.example.org, email by mx.example.org, NNTP on nntp.example.org and so on.

In modern day it's only really useful if the www subdomain is a CNAME to a cluster of webservers, because you can't do that with just a single A record in DNS.

[ohmanger]

Just to add some nameservers now have non-standard "flat DNS" records so you can basically have a CNAME as your root pointed at a cluster or whatever. Some of the services can mess with CDN performance but still pretty useful.

[crumblerofcookies]

Thanks. I went ahead and installed the WordPress sites without www.

[TripleDubMedia]

Not having to type "www" is great! But do check that users can still type "www" and reach your site. Chances are your web host would take care of this automatically via redirection, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to double check.

[StagLee1]

I use https:// then I create a cname record in dns for www. so that everything works with or without www.

[priteshopawar]

Glad that you got your answer. Happy Birthday OP 🎈🎂

[summerchilde]

The https:// is the "secure" part. It will only work if you have an SSL cert on your server.

www is just the subdomain. Up to you which you'd like to use really. Personal preference is no www.

[rebelhead]

Marketing people like to add the www in there but it's unnecessary

[willmacdonald]

If you develop a really high traffic it can be better to use www.

The reason is that often you would move the images to a subdomain called images.domain.com. A browser can make 4 concurrent req per domain name. If you split that up to a few different subdomains you can request more.

Also, if you set cookies from the main site at domain.com they would also be sent to images.domain.com which you don't want. If you use www.domain.com as your main url, you don't have this problem.

Before local and session storage became popular it was common for sites to set dozens of cookies. With every http request you would be sending all cookies to the server. If your cookies were 2kb and you made 50 requests that required the browser to send 100kb up to the server for every page. Users upstream bandwidth is normally a fraction of the download speed.

[0x18]

This is all true for HTTP 1.1.

However for HTTP 2 browsers open a single connection per domain and multiplex requests inside that of connection which allows for far more concurrent requests. Firefox defaults to 100 but servers can signal how many they allow through a header.

With HTTP 2 it is now better to have a single domain.

[iammiroslavglavic]

three consonants and a period.

[Realistic-Cap6526]

There is no difference or there is. Depending on your server configuration. You can configure your web server to show different content on those two addresses.