Are sites dropping "www." again?

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#1

Many years ago, every website URL started with www. Then came a move to drop the www to help speed up the web (by eliminating those four characters, I guess). Then the www became fashionable again, and in some cases, it boosted performance by allowing CDNs properly to cache website content.

Now, we seem to be swinging back to dropping the www. I poked around and found that these websites have dropped the www:

Does anyone know if this is a “thing” or just a preference?

#2

I agree with you, it’s definitely growing.

This is totally off the cuff but I wonder if the original wave was quashed as CDN’s started growing in popularity / capability but modern DNS didn’t support CNAME-style apex values? So folks moved back to www. for CDN gains? But now DNS has come along and CDN support on apex records (of sorts)(@netlify) works so people are moving back to naked domains?

A curious industry move for sure but one I’m happy with, personally. I think “www” was a moniker from years ago to indicate in verbal text that we were talking about a website and not an ftp: host, irc connection, etc. Now everything is just web :rofl:

#3

@jonsully Well, a lot of it is “just web,” but there is also FTP and mail and other utility and custom prefixes such as maps. Even the “big boys” such as Apple and Google seem to have flip-flopped – once having maps.apple.com and maps.google.com, which each now redirects to domain.com/maps.

#4

Haha - Google just up and got their own TLD -> .google! This is legit: domains.google

I suppose I just mean that we no longer need the “www” moniker in oral communications to indicate we’re talking about the web platform. I think it’s similar to how advertising (both oral and written) have moved away from writing http[s]:// too. People are just very familiar with the web now.

Subdos totally hold for various services but I think since the www subdo was an oral communication clarifier (IMO) and apex ALIAS / CDN support is fully ready, I think we’ll see folks get more away from www.

To your point though, I think there is another general trend right now to move more toward monolith code bases. There’s obviously tons of pros and cons to that but one of the pros (not that you can’t do it with microservices but it’s… trickier) is that all of your stuff is on the same domain and just uses /paths :thinking: