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Moving SiteBuilder pages from www2.warwick.ac.uk to warwick.ac.uk

From 30 October 2017 onwards, the primary web address for all SiteBuilder pages is warwick.ac.uk instead of www2.warwick.ac.uk.

All of the University's public-facing websites use SiteBuilder so we can remove the www2 part of the address to give visitors confidence that they're visiting the primary web pages of the University.

When is this happening?

  • Monday, 30 October 2017: change the primary address to warwick.ac.uk
  • Monday, 27 November 2017: permanently redirect visitors from www2.warwick.ac.uk to warwick.ac.uk

What are the changes?

Prior to 30 October 2017, when you visited a SiteBuilder address on warwick.ac.uk or www.warwick.ac.uk such as https://warwick.ac.uk/about/visiting, SiteBuilder redirected you to www2.warwick.ac.uk. The first part of the change removes this redirect. Now, you see the same page as when you visit www2 but the web address does not change. We tell search engines that they should use the warwick.ac.uk version of the web page.

For the vast majority of pages, everything works as before when your pages are accessed over warwick.ac.uk. You don't need to change any links to other SiteBuilder pages; we rewrite these links when they're clicked.

On 27 November 2017, we carried out the second part of this change – to permanently redirect visitors from www2.warwick.ac.uk to warwick.ac.uk.

What do I need to do?

If your web pages contain custom code snippets or linked content check them for references to www2.warwick.ac.uk, as we can't rewrite these automatically. However, these should continue to work even after the change.

If you use content feed pages to your own web servers and you're protecting that content based on the SiteBuilder URL it comes from, you may need to make a change on your own web server to prepare for the change of address.

If you link to www2.warwick.ac.uk, you can start changing it to warwick.ac.uk now without breaking anything.

Any Go redirects that currently use the address (e.g.) warwick.ac.uk/its will continue to work as before.

Why is this happening?

When we first started to use SiteBuilder at Warwick, there was a mixture of departmental and other websites on legacy systems and SiteBuilder. So that the old websites continued to work, we kept warwick.ac.uk and www.warwick.ac.uk the same and added www2.warwick.ac.uk. Now that all of the University's public-facing websites use SiteBuilder, it makes sense to use the main web address for the University.

Some search engines may rank web pages slightly higher when we use the main web address.

Support

Email webteam at warwick dot ac dot uk
How to report a problem