Your site loads on two addresses and neither one wins
If both example.com and www.example.com serve your site and neither redirects to the other, search engines treat them as two separate sites with identical content. Every link you earn is split between the two copies instead of adding up.
Check your domain
Free, no signup. Paste a product or article URL rather than just the homepage if you can, for the reason in the next section.
How common this actually is
We scanned 2,168 US small business websites across eight trades. On 9.4% of them the bare domain and the www version both served the site with no redirect between them and no canonical tag to resolve it. The rate held steady across every trade we looked at, from 3.7% to 15.3%, so this is not one bad web designer. It is a whole segment of the web.
It is invisible from the outside, which is why it survives for years. Nothing looks broken to a visitor. Both addresses load the site, both look right, and the cost shows up only as rankings that never quite arrive.
Three ways people think they fixed it, and did not
A CNAME from www to the apex. This is the most common one. A CNAME is an address, not an instruction: it makes www serve the same site, it does not send anyone anywhere. The browser bar still says www, both hosts return 200, and search engines still see two sites. DNS has no concept of a redirect at all. Only HTTP does, via a 301.
A redirect on the homepage only. The root gets fixed and every interior page keeps answering on both hosts. That is the version that survives longest, because the homepage is the page people remember to test. Deep pages are also where it matters most, since that is where your content and your inbound links actually are.
A redirect that drops the path. Sending www.example.com/products/blue-widget to the homepage throws away the exact link equity you were trying to consolidate, and irritates the visitor who wanted that page. The redirect has to preserve the path.
Check with your host first. Genuinely.
Plenty of hosts and DNS providers will do this for free, and if yours does, use it. This is a real fix that costs nothing and we would rather tell you that than sell you something you do not need. Where it gets awkward is hosts that offer no redirect at all, or only a path-dropping one, or that want a plan upgrade for it. That is when the rest of this page is worth reading.
With RedirectIQ: one CNAME, and your apex never moves
- 1Add
www.yoursite.comto RedirectIQ. We point it at the bare domain, path for path. - 2Change one CNAME record on the www subdomain. Your apex keeps serving your site exactly as it does now, untouched.
- 3SSL is provisioned automatically, and the 301 is live globally in under a minute.
- 4Every hit on it is logged, so if something starts 404ing later you hear about it instead of finding out from a rankings report.
The www side is deliberately the one that moves. www is an ordinary subdomain, so a plain CNAME works everywhere. Putting the redirect on the apex instead means fighting a DNS spec that forbids CNAME records there, and every provider has invented a different workaround.
Hobby is the plan for this
$1/moThis job is one domain and one rule, which is exactly what Hobby is. You do not need more, and we would rather you did not buy more.
1 domain, 100 redirect rules, 1M redirects a month.
The free plan gives you 3 rules on a yourname.free.redirectiq.comsubdomain with no DNS change and no card, so you can see how it works before pointing a real domain at us. Upgrade whenever you want, keep what you built.
Why keep paying after it is fixed?
Fair question, and worth answering plainly: the redirect is hosted here, so it keeps working, and we watch what happens to it. When a page starts 404ing, when a redirect chain forms, when traffic hits a path you have no rule for, that shows up in your dashboard. The www fix is a one-off. Knowing what breaks next is not.
Want the wider check? Scan your whole site for redirect chains and loops →
Related use cases
Prefer the standalone tool with shareable results? www redirect checker → Or start free.