Keep www in the domain or not?

[SOM24]

I have a client who had a wordpress website built about 1.5 years ago without the www in front of the domain.  In May of this year client decided to have his website rebuilt.  The new web designer built the site in Joomla and changed hosting company (first website hosted by Go Daddy) the new web designer built the new site with the www in front of the domain.  He put redirects from the old to the new.  Client wants to go back to wordpress design.  My question is: do we keep the www as the new site has this or revert back to the domain without the www.  (domains are the same between the new and old site, only difference is old site has no www and new site does) web designer put in redirects to go from non www site to new site with www however I don't think he did it right.  New site is still getting errors and when I look in the hosting account there are 9 pages of redirects.  The old and new site are not that big.  The hosting company tech support was a little shocked that there were 9 pages of redirects.  My question is: will client loose what momentum we've built with redirecting traffic to the www new site?  We've been working hard since the new site launched to get it indexed.  Thoughts? Feedback please.   We are going to move back to wordpress platform but I'm not sure about this www whether we keep it or not.  I just don't want to mess up any indexing that we've achieved with the new site  if we revert back to the domain without the www in front of it.  Thank you

[MikeRoberts]

There is no definitive benefit of having WWW vs. not having WWW... best to choose one and stick to it. If you're switching from one to the other, make sure that all of the necessary redirects are correct and change your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. My personal opinion would be to stick with the way they had it originally when it was first set up.

[josh-riley]

I agree with Mike. Keep what you had, since it's part of the online brand at this point. And redirects are harmless, assuming they are done correctly and people can find your site (without the feeling like they are dealing with something spammy).

[SOM24]

Thanks for your responses.  So to clarify you both think we should stick with the way we originally had it (before the redesign) I don't think the new web guy set up the re-directs correctly to go from first site (old one) to the 2nd site (new one)

[josh-riley]

If there's that many redirects, I'd agree something is off - which is a bigger concern.

[SEMServices]

I do have lots of experience personally and professionally on WWW and non-WWW websites.

I guess you have expertise in WP and SEO, so giving only main points to determine without explaining the story of SEO and WORDPRESS.

Lets consider the example scenario:
domain.com occupies 9 characters in the search engine URL data
www.domain.com occupies 12 characters in the search engine URL data (extra 3 characters)

if you are very much serious about SEO and wanted to rank and optimize your site for search engine traffic better to remove WWW in the website URL

Points to remember: 1.  Inform google webmaster tools about your website (either www or non-www)
2.  use .htaccess from www to non-www redirection
3. Use Wordpress Redirection plugin initially for monitoring what urls are being redirected and how

If you aware of Canonical URL concept, please go ahead and use properly
www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/index.php

Note: As you might be using Wordpress, using SEO Plugin will help you in applying a Canonial URL

When to use What - if you are looking for branding and not expecting too much search traffic use the extra WWW prefix

• if you are only interested to get search traffic and the website is not a brand (example: services, blog, keyword-rich domain) remove WWW

Consider Examples like:
moz.com
yoast.com