www

  • www stands for World Wide Web and is a relict from the early internet days
  • . is hard to spell in english (double you, double you, double you, double you, dot)
  • . is just an optional subdomain
  • A domain without www is called apex-, naked- or bare-domain
  • Print designers like the look - print ads mostly include the . prefix
  • Young people tend to skip . when typing in a domain in the address bar of the browser
  • Old people always type . before they type the actual domain name
  • Some web masters forget to set up this subdomain > 404
  • . is coming back with modern cloud hosting (CNAME records, CDNs …)

Sources: 1, 2, 3