Domain Name Set Up (Website URL)

The What:

We start with one of the most basic—though also one of the most important—questions: is your website domain set up correctly? On first glance, you may think that it is, but the fact of the matter is that there are many veterinary pages that are incorrectly set up—meaning they have two versions of the same website out there, competing with each other.

To be more specific, we’ll use the example of a fictional practice called Good Veterinary Hospital. Now, this veterinarian does not have their domain set up correctly—as such, their website can be reached at www.GoodVeterinaryHospital.com as well as at GoodVeterinaryHospital.com (notice the second version does not have www). This is bad—by having two versions of the same website, search engines like Google view this as duplicate content, which lowers the “value” of Good Veterinary Hospital’s SEO.

The Why:

Considering the simplicity of this issue, this year’s decline in corrected domains is concerning. It’s likely that many of the practices that caused the rather large increase in secure websites did not install their SSL certificates correctly. This could cause a separation of domains, making one “secure” and one “not secure,” neither of which would be able to redirect to the other. The example for this would be https://www.GoodVeterinaryHospital.com versus http://www.GoodVeterinaryHospital.com.

The How:

How to check if your website domain is set up correctly: Type 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.

How To Fix This: Both of these 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 NameCheap 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.