How to add www to your domain

Before you begin

To guarantee that your website will open properly when visitors search using both the root domain and a www with your root domain, you will need to  create a www CNAME record for your root domain.   Creating a CNAME record will help avoid the risk of duplicate content and divided indexing, making a direct positive impact on your website’s SEO. 

You may need your domain to be accessible using www. There are two cases when adding www to your root domain. One is if you have pointed your domain with 10Web nameservers and the second is if you have pointed your domain to 10Web with an A record. 

Website pointed to 10Web with nameservers

If you have pointed your domain by replacing the nameservers at your domain registrar with 10Web nameservers, this means that 10Web has automatically created an A and CNAME record for your domain.  The CNAME record, in this case, redirects or points to the A record or the root domain. 

To add www to your www domain:

1. Log into your 10Web account
2. Click on the website of which you want to redirect the domain
3. Click on the W icon to navigate to it’s WordPress admin dashboard
4. In the WP dashboard, hover on Settings and click on General

   You will see two fields: Wordpress address URL & Site address URL. Both fields will have your website URL without the www. 

5. Add a www. to both URLs in front of the root domain as shown in the example below where “yourdomain.com” should be replaced with your existing domain name. 

   https://www.yourdomain.com

6. Click Save Changes to activate the redirection and clear Cache

Website pointed to 10Web with an A record

If your domain was pointed to 10Web using an A record, this means that your DNS records are managed elsewhere and possibly an automatic CNAME record has not been created. Before moving forward, please log in to your domain registrar:

1. Go to manage your DNS records
2. Check that a CNAME record for www. exists

If not, please add the CNAME record to your DNS records then follow the steps in the above section for adding www to your domain.

Here is how to add a CNAME record for a few widely used domain registrars. 

Setting up a CNAME record with GoDaddy.

Setting up a CNAME record with NameCheap.

Setting up a CNAME record with Google Domains.

To confirm that your redirection is successful, enter your website URL in the browser using www then hit enter. You should be redirected to your website.