Website not loading unless I have www in the URL

Hi there, I've just published our website. It's connected to an external domain account with IONOS. For some reason the website only loads if it has www in front of the domain name. Any ideas? Assume it's something I need to add to the DNS control panel in IONOS? Technically inept, sorry in advance!

This is the website FYI

www.wildandwhimsy.co.uk

It loads fine to me for non-www

16 hours ago, tuanphan said:

It loads fine to me for non-www

If you are checking in the browser then it will try variations on the base address you enter to try and get to an address. This all happens out of site.

So what is happening when you enter an address is the browser first trying the one you enter. wildandwhimsy.co.uk. When it gets a fail on that it tries www.wildandwhimsy.co.uk and so forth. The browser basically tries all the likely possibilities, all out of site.

Not sure all browsers do this but the big ones do.

Using a command line tool like curl with wildandwhimsy.co.uk you get no response. But with www.wildandwhimsy.co.uk you do.

@VanessaWhimsy

This indicates to me that you've not set up a wildcard record that tells your domain what to do when hitting just the base domain name. In most cases that is to hit the www dns record.

This is an issue you need to take up with your domain registrar as it has nothing to do with your SS site, i.e. there no SS settings that will magically fix things. I took a quick look at your registrars docs but they were mostly cryptic and unhelpful. Not surprising. It takes a lot of effort to write quality helpful docs for those that aren't tech heads.

14 hours ago, VanessaWhimsy said:

For some reason the website only loads if it has www in front of the domain name. Any ideas?

By default, your site should work correctly with or without the "www" subdomain. It does for me 🙂

As @creedon said, if a user types the domain name into their browser without the "www" it should automatically redirect to www.wildandwhimsy.co.uk. This is by design.

If you don't want the "www" to appear,  you can disable this as follows:

1. In Squarespace, go to Settings > Domains.
2. In the DOMAINS MANAGED BY THIRD-PARTY section, click your domain name. It should have a 'PRIMARY' label.
3. In the panel that appears on the right, uncheck Use www prefix.

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