The bare domain, or www

Issue Mint puts your website on the bare domain by default, so example.com rather than www.example.com, and www redirects to it. One host is canonical and the other sends readers there, which is what keeps a single address in your sitemap, your social cards, your confirmation emails and the link on every issue page.

The other way round is available, and it exists for one reason: some DNS providers cannot point the root of a domain at us at all.

Why some domains cannot use the bare domain

The root of a domain carries records that a CNAME is not allowed to sit beside, so a provider cannot serve the record Issue Mint asks for literally.

Most providers work round this by resolving our target themselves and answering with addresses instead, which is correct behaviour and verifies green. Cloudflare does it always, and plenty of registrars offer it under a name like ALIAS, ANAME or CNAME flattening. Some providers do not offer it at all, and there is no way round that from either end: not from your side, because the feature is not there, and not from ours, because there is nothing we can point at.

When Issue Mint offers www instead

The offer appears in the domain tab when three things are true at once: www has verified, the bare domain has not, and everything else that counts has.

Those conditions are the signature of a provider that cannot answer for the root, as opposed to a domain that is still propagating. Mid-propagation everything looks broken, and telling somebody to restructure their address thirty seconds after they added the records would be advice they have to undo an hour later. The bare domain will not verify covers the checks worth making before you accept the offer.

What switching changes

One button, and your website is canonical on www.yourdomain.com from that moment.

Everything that advertises the site follows: the address shown in your dashboard, the canonical tag on every page, the social card URL, the sitemap, the links inside confirmation emails and the address printed on your issues. The bare domain redirects to www if and when it resolves, which reverses the usual direction. The records for the bare domain stay in the table and keep being checked, but they stop counting towards whether the domain is verified, so a domain sitting at Not working goes green straight away. Verification runs again the moment you switch, rather than at the next sweep.

One row of the HTTPS card will keep saying it is waiting: the certificate for the bare domain, which cannot be issued while that hostname does not resolve. That is expected on a www domain and affects nothing a reader touches.

What switching does not change

Sending, tracking and your subscribers are all untouched.

The records that let issues come from your own address sit on the domain itself rather than on either host, so nothing about sending from your own domain is affected by this choice. Click tracking runs on go.yourdomain.com either way, and link tracking on your own domain reads the same to a reader. Your list, your archive and your analytics do not know the difference.

Switching back

The domain tab keeps a line offering the bare domain again, for anybody who later moves to a provider that can do it.

Because the records for the bare domain were never removed and never stopped being checked, switching back is one click as well. If the record has started resolving in the meantime, the domain stays verified through the change.

Issue Mint does not offer www as a preference

If your provider can point the root at us, the bare domain is what you get, and there is no setting to choose www because you like it better.

That is a deliberate limit rather than an oversight. The choice exists to get somebody out of a corner their provider put them in, and offering it as a matter of taste would mean two supported addresses for every domain, and twice as many ways for a canonical address to disagree with itself. If you want www and your provider supports the root, the honest answer is that Issue Mint will not do it today.