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 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. |
| 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 but the challenge for large organizations is how to redirect for older browsers that simply do not support the minimal TLS. |
| 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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