Your own domain
www.yourname.com, or just yourname.com?
You get both. Whichever one you type in when you connect the domain becomes your site's real address, and the other one permanently sends visitors to it.
So if you type yourbakery.com, then www.yourbakery.com redirects to it. Type www.yourbakery.com and it works the other way round. One domain, one charge of 99¢ a month, both names covered, certificates on both.
Changed your mind? Type the other form on the domain page. It just flips the direction — no second charge, no new records, nothing to undo.
So which should you choose?
It genuinely does not matter to visitors — nobody types either one any more; they search or they tap a link. Pick on taste:
yourbakery.comis shorter, and looks better on a flyer or a card.www.yourbakery.comis the older convention and is guaranteed to work at every domain company in the world.
If you have no opinion, take the short one and read the next section.
The catch with the short one
The bare name — yourbakery.com with no www — is a special case in the way domains work, and some companies simply will not point it at another address. In our experience that includes GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, Hover, IONOS and Network Solutions.
The domain page knows this. When your domain is at one of those companies it tells you so on the spot and gives you two ways forward:
- "Use www.yourbakery.com instead" — one click, and the short name redirects to it. This is the easy answer and there is nothing wrong with it.
- Keep the short name and use your provider's own forwarding — most of them offer a "forwarding" or "redirect" feature that does the same job from their side.
Where a company does allow it, the record we ask for may be called ALIAS, ANAME or CNAME flattening rather than CNAME. The page names the one your provider actually uses, so you are looking for the same word on both screens.
What visitors see either way
One address in the browser bar, with a padlock. Anyone arriving at the other form is moved across before the page loads. Links you have already printed, shared or put on a business card keep working whichever form they use.