Your address without the www fails: one DNS record

A local shop's site opened fine at www.example-shop.com, which is what the owner always clicked from a bookmark. But most people type the short name, example-shop.com, from a business card, a van or a Google listing, and that showed an error page. Nothing on the site itself was broken: the short name simply was not pointed anywhere. Here is what each address did before and after, and the fix.

Check yours in ten seconds: on your phone, type your address without the www into the browser and press Go. Then try it with the www. Both should land on your home page.

What a customer types	Before	After
example-shop.com	"This site can't be reached" on a phone; a certificate warning on some laptops	opens the home page (forwarded to https://www.example-shop.com)
http://example-shop.com	the same error	opens the home page, padlock on
www.example-shop.com	worked	still works, unchanged
Google	Before, Google could see two different answers for one business and some links pointed at the dead name. After, every version forwards to the one address, so nothing is lost.

What was wrong

The domain's DNS (the address book that tells browsers where a name lives) had an entry for www and none for the bare name. That happens a lot after a move to a new website company: the new host's setup page asks you to add the www record, and the old record for the bare name is deleted or left pointing at the old server.

Before:
  www              CNAME   shops.example-host.com
  (bare name)      -- nothing --

After:
  www              CNAME   shops.example-host.com
  @  (bare name)   A       the host's address, from its setup page
                           (or the domain company's forwarding to www)

How it was fixed

Find who holds the DNS. Not always the website company: often the domain company (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace Domains) or Cloudflare. A public lookup shows which, in a minute.
Ask the website company what the bare name should point at. Every host publishes it (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and most hosting panels show the exact record on their "connect a domain" page).
Add that one record for the bare name, or turn on the domain company's forwarding from the bare name to the www address. Nothing else in the DNS is touched, so email keeps working.
Make sure the certificate covers both names, so the short address does not open on a "Not secure" warning. Most hosts issue it on their own within an hour of the record appearing; some need one click.
Check every version: bare and www, http and https, on a phone on mobile data and on a desktop. Each one should end on the same home page with the padlock on.

What it costs

A fixed price, quoted before anything is touched, and you pay only after both addresses open your site. No password needed: your domain company lets you add a helper (GoDaddy, Namecheap and Cloudflare all have a "share access" or "add member" screen) and you remove me afterwards. If you would rather do it yourself, the steps above are all of it, and I will tell you the exact record for your site for free.

The site in the table is a composite built for this demo, not a real business; the fault and the steps are the ones found on real small-business sites in October 2026. More before/after examples, and who I am: all demos.