Neither one is better. That is the entire answer to the question as asked, and if it ends your worry, good. The question underneath it is the one that costs people money: Whichever you pick, does every part of your website agree? Because to a search engine, www.yourbusiness.com and yourbusiness.com are not one address written two ways. They are two different websites, and everything your site earns is being credited to one, the other, or a confused split between them.
Two addresses, one business
A person reads both forms as the same place. Machines don't get to. Each is a separate hostname that could, in principle, serve entirely different content, so a search engine treats them as two sites until your configuration says otherwise.
You say otherwise with two tools. A redirect physically forwards a visitor from the version you didn't pick to the one you did. A canonical tag is a line in the page's code that tells machines which address is the official one, so that links, rankings, and history all pool in one place instead of splitting across two. When the redirect and the canonicals agree, everything you earn lands in one pile. When they disagree, you are quietly running two thin websites instead of one solid one.
Disagreement is the actual failure mode, and it does not announce itself. The site loads fine either way. Visitors never notice. The only party keeping score is the machine deciding which of your two addresses deserves to rank, and it is being handed contradictory testimony.
How we got it wrong on our own site
We run this checklist on our own properties, which is how we know where it bites. Mid-2026, our site was serving pages at the www address while every canonical tag on the site declared the bare domain official, and the bare domain, asked directly, forwarded people to www with a redirect marked temporary. Three parts of one small website, each telling search engines a different story about which of two addresses was real. Nothing looked broken in a browser. All of it was wrong.
The fix took an afternoon: one permanent redirect, www to bare domain, every path preserved, agreeing with what the canonicals already claimed. That redirect is now load-bearing forever. A permanent redirect means what it says — machines take you at your word and transfer the address's standing — which is also why the temporary marking was its own small disaster. A temporary redirect asks the machine to keep checking back, to keep the old address alive in its records, to commit to nothing.
The same audit caught something worse. Every page on the site carried a canonical tag pointing at the homepage. One inherited line of configuration, applied sitewide, was telling search engines that our services pages, our articles, and our contact page were all just copies of the front page and could be ignored. Twenty-one pages volunteering to disappear. There is now an automated check that fails the build if any page's canonical drifts, because a mistake that invisible will absolutely happen twice.
The judgment calls
Which version to pick is worth five minutes and no more. The bare domain is shorter, reads cleaner on a business card, and matches how people say your name out loud. The www form has some old technical arguments in its favor that stopped mattering for a business this size years ago. Pick on taste, then stop thinking about it.
Switching later is the one genuinely bad option. If your site has lived at one form for years, that address holds your accumulated standing, and moving it means forwarding everything and waiting while machines re-learn. Consistency you already have beats a preference you just formed.
And whatever you settle, write it down as the one true spelling of your web address, then use it identically everywhere your business appears: your Google profile, your social accounts, directories, invoices, the lot. Consistency across those listings is a real signal machines use to confirm you are you. It is the same discipline that makes a phone number worth keeping stable, and it costs nothing but attention.
What agreement will not do
Getting this right earns you nothing by itself. No ranking boost arrives when your redirects and canonicals agree. What you have done is stop leaking — stopped splitting your standing across two addresses, stopped telling machines your pages are duplicates of each other, stopped filing contradictory testimony. Everything else on the baseline builds on an address machines can trust; this item just makes the foundation stop arguing with itself.
The check takes two minutes and no tools. Type all four versions of your address into a browser: with and without www, with http and https in front. All four should end, after at most one hop, at exactly one address. Then view any page's source, search for the word "canonical," and confirm the address in that line matches where you landed. If both are true, this item is done and you never think about it again. If they aren't, you now know something about your website that whoever built it doesn't, and it is the kind of thing worth fixing before you spend a single dollar sending traffic to it.
Whether anyone can find the address you've consolidated is the next question, and it has more moving parts than this one.