It’s one of the most basic—but important—must-haves: a website domain that is set up correctly. Luckily, it appears most practices have accomplished this, but still too many have not.

When your site’s domain isn’t set up properly, you essentially have two versions of your website on the internet competing with each other. One has a “www.” in front of the URL, the other does not. Google sees this is duplicate content and lowers the value of your SEO.

It’s likely the 13% of practices with a faulty domain set-up did not install their SSL certificates correctly. That usually results in a “separation of domains”, where one is secure and the other is not. Neither will redirect to the other, unfortunately.

Check and make sure your website domain is set up correctly by typing your domain name into your browser’s address bar including the “www.” (for example: www.YourHospitalName.com). Once the page loads completely, remove the www. from the address bar and hit return. If your domain reloads and displays without the www. (as “YourHospitalName.com”), your website is duplicated. This is detrimental. If it reloads with the www. automatically, you are set up correctly.

This also works vice versa with the www. redirecting to no www. The important thing is to not have both versions load. If you or your developer has added an SSL certification to your website, type in “http://” before your domain name. Your website should automatically reload to “https://” if the certificate was installed correctly.

Both issues are pretty technical, so talk to your web developer ASAP. If you don’t have one, you can fix the “www.” redirect by using this link from Tribulant to set up the DNS record yourself. For the incorrect SSL installation, you’ll need to contact your service provider if you don’t have a developer.