A website address contains the letters www. What do those letters mean? And why are they not always used?
Www
The Internet is a large network of interconnected computers. People can do all kinds of things through this network. For example, sending emails. But also visit websites. They do the latter on the ‘world wide web’. This is English for the ‘world wide web’ and is abbreviated to ‘www’. This refers to the part of the Internet that consists of websites.
web address
An address (URL) is required to perform tasks on the internet. Just like every house has its own address, every website has a unique address. The website can be found on the internet via the address. For example, the full address of the SeniorWeb website is https://www.seniorweb.nl
Each web address consists of several parts. It starts with the ‘https://’ part. This indicates that it is a secure website. Then come the letters ‘www’, which stand for ‘world wide web’. The address ends with the so-called domain, in our example that is ‘seniorweb.nl’. That is the name of the website.
Use www
In the early days of the Internet age, Internet users always had to type in the full web address to get to a website. If they wanted to view SeniorWeb online, they typed ‘www.seniorweb.nl’ in full. Nowadays this is usually no longer necessary. The domain is already enough to visit a website. To take a look at the SeniorWeb website, you can only type ‘seniorweb.nl’ in the browser. The browser then automatically adds the first part of the address (https://www.) in the background. Unfortunately, this does not happen with all websites.
Other addresses
Most websites have an address as described above. However, it also happens that web addresses look different. An example of this is https://bit.ly/342SUlR. The address does start with ‘https://’. That’s why we know it’s a web page. This is an example of a shortened address. Some web addresses are very long. That is not always convenient. That’s why there are programs that make the shorter web addresses, but they do look a bit strange. A shortened web address can be dangerous because the link does not tell you which website the link is going to. So always pay close attention when clicking on these types of links.