1 in 5 Dealer Websites Break Without the www. Is Yours One of Them?
If your dealership website only loads when someone types the www, shoppers who type your bare domain get an error page instead of your inventory. On October 19, 2026 we checked 18,926 franchised dealer websites, and 3,604 of them, nearly one in five, failed without the www. The fix is usually a small DNS change that takes minutes. Here's how to check yours and what to ask for.
How to check your dealership's website in 30 seconds
- Open a private or incognito browser window, so your browser can't autocomplete from history.
- Type your domain with no www, for example yourstore.com, and press enter.
- Try it again with https://yourstore.com.
If both land on your homepage with the www added, you're fine. If you get "site can't be reached," a security warning, or a blank page, your root domain isn't set up.
Most people at the store never notice, because their bookmarks and browser history already include the www.
Why it costs you shoppers
Plenty of traffic arrives on the bare domain without anyone at the store realizing it:
- Ads read out loud. Radio and TV spots say "yourstore dot com," and that's what people type.
- Print, signs and frames. License plate frames, billboards and business cards usually drop the www.
- Links from other sites. Sponsorship pages, local news, chamber directories and some listing sites link to the bare domain. A link to an error page passes no value to your search rankings.
- Your Google Business Profile. If the website field uses the bare domain, the most clicked link to your store is broken.
- AI assistants. Domains usually appear without the www in text, so when ChatGPT or Google's AI cites or opens your site, it's likely to use the bare form.
None of these shoppers try again with the www. They go to the next dealer.
Which dealers are affected
Ford and Lincoln stores were hit hardest in our check, at 40%. It isn't a sign of a bad website or a careless store. It's a setting that was never part of anyone's job.
Why it happens
Most dealer website providers give the store a DNS record for the www version only. The root domain, the version with nothing in front, can't hold that kind of record, so it gets left empty at the registrar. Nothing looks broken from inside the dealership, so nobody fixes it.
There are a few versions of the problem:
- No record at all. The bare domain doesn't point anywhere, and the browser says it can't connect.
- Certificate error. The bare domain points somewhere, but the security certificate only covers the www. Shoppers see a full-page warning, which is worse than an error.
- Wrong destination. The bare domain points at an old site, a parked page or the registrar's default page.
How to fix it
Whoever manages your domain, usually your registrar account, IT provider or website provider, needs to do two things:
- Point the root domain somewhere that answers. Depending on your DNS provider, that's an A record pointed at a redirect service, an ALIAS or ANAME record, or CNAME flattening.
- Redirect it to the www with a 301. The redirect should keep the path, so yourstore.com/service lands on www.yourstore.com/service, and it should work on https with a valid certificate.
Then test both versions again in a private window. The whole change usually takes a few minutes once the right person has the login.
Here's a message you can send: "Our website loads at www.ourstore.com but not at ourstore.com. Can you add a record for the root domain and a 301 redirect to the www version, with a certificate that covers both?"
While you're in your DNS settings
The same records control whether scammers can send email that looks like it comes from your store. Run your domain through our free domain and email security check to see whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up, and fix both at once.
What we're doing about it
We're contacting every affected dealer individually with the fix, for free. There's no pitch and no contract, and we're keeping the list private. If you'd like to know whether your store is on it, reach out and we'll check.
We found this through the same nightly monitoring behind our dealership website speed test and SEO audit. You can see every franchised rooftop we check on our car dealership map, and read how our crawler identifies itself on the DealerDataOne-Crawler page.
The bigger point
This is a small problem with a fast fix, and it sat unnoticed at thousands of stores because checking it was nobody's job. Most dealership marketing problems look like that. Control Center watches for them every day, and Astra and our team fix them as part of Fully Managed. For more on what's worth monitoring, see how to audit what your marketing vendors actually do.
