It is often desirable to have consistency on how your domain name brand looks on your website. Here are the practices we use based on evolving de facto standards.
| Practice | Example | Why | How to Do It |
|---|---|---|---|
| Normalize to www | http://bonsaiframework.com → http://www.bonsaiframework.com Including full urls such as http://bonsaiframework.com/ubuntu/ → http://www.bonsaiframework.com/ubuntu/ | Visually it's more appealing and ensures your domain name stands out more. | Bonsai Framework show how to enforce www but for large organizations consider working with your CDN. |
| Do not requires index.html. | http://www.bonsaiframework.com/ubuntu/index.html → http://www.bonsaiframework.com/ubunut/ | Visually more appealing and less work for users. | Baked into default by Apache but you need to build your site using index.html files and not something like http://www.bonsaiframework.com/ubuntu/homepage.html as our starting page. For organizational search engine optimization reasons you may need to use special names. In that case ... (I gotta review the best method still here). |
| Use Sub Domains Judcisiouly | www.linux.bonsaiframework.com → www.bonsaiframework.com/linux However, there are arguably valid cases where users prefer to type such as, www.acmebank.com - public site | ||
| Internationalization and urls | |||
| Canonicalize your duplicate pages. | ... | ||
| Switch to SSL TLS version current down to 1.1 or for marketing consider 1.0. | www.bonsaiframework.com → https://www.bonsaiframework.com | Better rankings in search engines and confidence in users. Additionally prevents alleviates against man-in-the-middle attacks. Any collection of customer information should use TLS 1.2 or higher. | Redirect is straightforward. The challenge for large organizations is how to redirect for older browsers that simply do not support the minimal TLS (this needs to be it's own article). Today (Oct 2017) google still supports TLS 1.0. The PCI Council originally wanted to declare TLS 1.0 obsolete by June 30, 2016 but since pushed back to June 30, 2018. |
| Redirects should be file based and generally aim to use 301 "Moved Permanently". | Moved permanently is best for SEO and passes between 90-99% of ranking power to the new page. Note transferring content becomes more complex when an entire site changes its domain or when content moves from one domain to another. | If you have a CDN look for an API which under the hoods uses a web server redirect. For example Akamai's Edge Redirector Cloudlet can be programmatically populated via their API. You may use your Web Server such as Apache mod_rewrite with the caveates,
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